Onboard NIC vs Stand alone

I guess Ive never thought of this before or had any reason to wonder, but would a NIC card thats not onboard perform better than an oboard NIC card?

Im not talking about the KILLER NIC cards, just in general.

I've never heard or read anything about this improving network quality so Id assume no.

Anyone ever done any tests comparing onboard vs stand alone?

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forkvoid

pLuhhmm wrote: »

I guess Ive never thought of this before or had any reason to wonder, but would a NIC card thats not onboard perform better than an oboard NIC card?

Im not talking about the KILLER NIC cards, just in general.

I've never heard or read anything about this improving network quality so Id assume no.

Anyone ever done any tests comparing onboard vs stand alone?

It depends on the NIC. In a standard desktop, not likely. Both are probably running over the PCI bus, so speed isn't going to change.

In a server environment, your servers have TCP offload engines. This moves the TCP/IP processing from the CPU to the NIC. You would notice a change in performance going from an onboard NIC with no offload processing to a PCI-X/PCIe NIC with offload processing. This is a moot point in small load systems, but becomes more important in high-load systems.

xenodamus

You learn something new every day. They sure didn't teach me that for the A+. Interesting, though.

tiersten

As with most devices, it is possible to have performance differences between two models or brands. Some NIC chipsets may just be higher performance than others whilst conversely they may also be badly implemented and buggy. You'll have to do research yourself to see whether a particular NIC is better than another.

If you're actually comparing the performance of a NIC chipset that is on the motherboard against the same chipset on a card then no, there shouldn't be any detectable difference between the two if both are correctly designed and implemented.

UnixGeek

tiersten wrote: »

As with most devices, it is possible to have performance differences between two models or brands. Some NIC chipsets may just be higher performance than others whilst conversely they may also be badly implemented and buggy. You'll have to do research yourself to see whether a particular NIC is better than another.

If you're actually comparing the performance of a NIC chipset that is on the motherboard against the same chipset on a card then no, there shouldn't be any detectable difference between the two if both are correctly designed and implemented.

My thoughts exactly. A general guideline that I follow is, if it the NIC's chipset is made by Intel or Broadcom, it's probably solid. If it's made by Realtek, don't use it anywhere that you care about network performance.