On Board NICS vs Dedicated cards???

[Cain]

Which one is better??

Explain...

[Sirex]

General usage... Not much difference.
Intense... If i remember right there still is little difference.

Off board does take it off your mbs buses which it would share with other things, but moves it to your pci bus say
Which i does increses its performance.

The main issue with any nic is the fact it still needed cpu cycles if i remember right....

This is where the "killernic" series was ment to improve things,
As the 'stack' was handled on the nic and not the main cpu.

Personally ive never seen any difference in on and off boards

[mapes]

On or off general purpose networking chips really don't make a diff. However when you move up to higher end server cards it's a bit different. Some of cards can do line rate speeds and have fancy offloading, bonding ability (called link aggregation) and multiple ports. Or they take whats called an SFP or XFP. Which will do up to 10GB copper or fiber optic networking(you can switch out an XFP or SFP as needed to do copper or fiber). Really since you probably have a non Foundry, Cisco or Juniper higher end switch I wouldn't bother.

[BlackArrow]

onboard....the discrete nics are a marketing gimic in my view for spoiled gamers with too much of their parents money to spend thinking it will make them the ultimate gamer.

[mapes]

onboard....the discrete nics are a marketing gimic in my view for spoiled gamers with too much of their parents money to spend thinking it will make them the ultimate gamer.

Yes the bigfoot or whatever gaming nic cards are bogus. What I was talking about in me previous post though are not those. I'm talking about data center network cards

[Cain]

I sometimes read that using a dedicated NIC can increase throughput...

We have a number of LARGE files and folders 25 Gigs plus, and moving them around can be very slow.

[mapes]

Do you have a decent switch? Without that it's moot. If you use a network server/storage box you can use whats called bonding or link aggregation. Basically you combine one or more Ethernet Interfaces into one logical one. The Network card then uses an algorithm to determine how to load balance the traffic across the physical ports. This is usually setup in a data center where you've got 500 people accessing a NFS or CIFS share. Again to see increased performance you can get a better switch and that will help

[{CLR} Cobalt]

I use dedicated. Had 2 onboards go out. Took a while to figure out what the problem was because it didnt stay down the whole time. Did it intermittently. Usually when I was downloading larger files like new games and such.

Gettin to 6gb when I needed 8 and starting over was a battle. I thought my isp was limiting the bandwidth usage. Called em a lot of bad names.

[juneau]

I sometimes read that using a dedicated NIC can increase throughput...

We have a number of LARGE files and folders 25 Gigs plus, and moving them around can be very slow.

Might sound like a dumb question, but all the parts in this network are gigabit specced right?

What sort of speeds are you getting? Gigabit has a theoretical limit of 125Mb/s.

edit: I wonder if this is a HDD limitation?

[Savage_Hobo]

The 128 MB/s limit is actually just the difference between bits and bytes (GigaBIT network references bits). But if you are looking at throughput in MegaBYTES you will find it will be 8 x less.

128 MegaBYTES/s * 8 bits/BYTE = 1024 Mb/s = 1 Gb/s.

Might sound like a dumb question, but all the parts in this network are gigabit specced right?

What sort of speeds are you getting? Gigabit has a theoretical limit of 125Mb/s.

edit: I wonder if this is a HDD limitation?

[juneau]

The 128 MB/s limit is actually just the difference between bits and bytes (GigaBIT network references bits). But if you are looking at throughput in MegaBYTES you will find it will be 8 x less.

128 MegaBYTES/s * 8 bits/BYTE = 1024 Mb/s = 1 Gb/s.

Off topic:
I got a question for you networking guru's. Who decided that the difference between bits and bytes would just be uppercase or lowercase for the 'b'.