Onboard LAN or pci card on NF7?
TheLostSwede
Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
I have been wondering of that lately but i have been to lazy to try. I have a few good quality ethernet cards here. What's the best choice? I have read that peeps do get better internet speeds with good quality pci cards.
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I have been using my onboard like you and Clutch as well as probably most have. I have also seen where peeps have claimed an increase with an add on PCI card but think that you would need a real high quality card to better it enough to warrant the change. What cards those may be is another question. I haven't been able to test as all my ethernet cards are 1 1/2 to 2 yrs old since I have been using onboard since the KT266 chipset was released.
I've tried the Intel EtherExpress PRO 100, a Netgear FA310TX, an the onboard NF7-S controller. The Intel is indeed the fastest by about 5% on LAN transfers (10700MBs vs 10200MBs). Using a 2Mbs cable connection I cannot tell them apart.
Interestingly, the Intel card had slightly higher CPU utilization spikes (1%-3%) but on average about the same as the others.
It seems as though there was much more product differentiation performance wise a few years ago than now.
HTH
Don't care if it utilize the cpu slightly more , as long is i get better dl speed.
There is also a number of LAN related tweaks that can help you.
You also realize that if you only have two computers networked you can go gigabit without a switch. I am buying 64bit cards on eBay for 20 to 30 bucks most of the time. The netgear cards don't even need a crossover cable. They figure the sh*t out by just plugging a regular cable in straight between two cards.
Tex
There is just too much variability in using dslreports to accurately say. Perhaps if I ran the test 100 times, the scores would converge around the fastest.
I ran the test 3 times for each adapter and just eyeballing the results there was no difference that I could tell. I really suspect that until each adapter becomes the bottleneck in the transfer as seen on the LAN you will have problems measuring a difference (there is < 1% CPU utilization for all adapters on a 2 Mbps transfer).
I used to use 3Com gear exclusively, because with end-to-end 3Com gear you have some great management tools available to you. However, the throughput increase is too much to justify not switching to Intel gear. I now have Intel PRO/100S server nics in my servers and PRO/1000 cards on the desktops.
Mack, I would say to put an Intel PRO/1000 card in your desktop - they are around $40 in the US.
Tex, that software from Intel, is that available for anyone with a Intel nic?
Not only the nics would be changed, the drivers would also off course. I know for a fact that a driverchange can change things considerably, even internet speed. I'm not asking for 100+mb/s here, it's only "if i can, i'll do it" that matters. A friend of mine got 10kb/s+ faster dl speed (sustained, not peaks) just by going from Win 98 to 2K on the same nic.
But beyond 98, it makes no difference what you do. It is what it is.
I didn't change anything else in regards to the system configuration, so I don't know what else to attribute it to.
No changes were made to the registry and I installed the latest NIC drivers from Intel.
So i may be on to something then?
/me swaps nics
The download speeds were tested while I was downloading the new Fedora Red Hat Linux client ISO's (3 discs).