Is an Add-on Network Card Better than Motherboard Ethernet?

[BigO]

S!~

Looking for some feeback on a possible purchase.

I saw this add-on network card and was wondering if anyone has it, and did it help your gaming experience?

What would the advantage be of having 128mb of memory on your network card?

http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/killer-2100/

[RCAF_FB_Vike]

Be careful, I have/had one(it's boxed up now , it was the pci version not the one you are looking at). it was given to me by a friend and I tried it out for about 3 months. I saw no gains in speed that where claimed by the manufacturer. Then I started having errors caused by the card's drivers and software. So I uninstalled it(that was not an easy process either involving going into the registry). A dedicated net card is better than onboard but not this one. As I recall they aren't exactly cheap either.

Actually this is the card I'm using now, works great and it's cheap, works well with Win7

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833166015


Hope that helps

S! Vike

[Trouble4u]

I don't know BigO, my old PC didn't have built in Ethernet and this one now has 2 built in. I never had a problem with either. This one is a lot faster but everything about this PC is better, faster and has more memory than my old one.

[Derring]

Is an Add-on Network Card Better than Motherboard Ethernet?

In general, No. The build-in may provide better bandwith, i.e. built-in vs PCI. It will depend on the bandwith of the internal interface and the bandwith of the PCI (33 MHz) or PCI-e (?? MHz).

I'm not sure of the benefits of the 400 Mhz Network Proccessing Unit, except that it may 'off-load' processing that maybe required by the CPU. It may act as a 'coprocessor' of Network traffic. If so, then there may be some benefit.

The other "Benefits" shown appear to relate to 'QOS', Quality of Service, that may be controlled by a Network Utility supplied with your motherboard. e.g. I have NVidia Gigabit Ethernet built-in but don't bother to mess with the QOS.

Most mother boards today provide 1Gigabit (1000 Mbs) ethernet. Most routers though are 100/10 Mbs ethernet. Some more expensive may provide 1 Gbs/100/10 Mbs. All new routers and ethernet port auto-negotiate the speed.

The real bottle neck is speed of the 'cable/DSL' modem (up/down stream) provided by your ISP.

If you were to use Windows Task Manager to monitor your Ethernet bandwidth useage, I dought it would come anywhere close to 10% running both IL2 and Team Speak concerently.

Afterthought: I think Big_Fred has a router that provided QOS capabilities, this may be a better way to go.

[Big_Fred]

Afterthought: I think Big_Fred has a router that provided QOS capabilities, this may be a better way to go.

No new router yet. We upgraded to cable modem and bandwidth was no longer a persistent issue. A router with QOS will improve your online experience if you have to share bandwidth with others in your household. It allows you to set priorities for certain throughput (game data) and push video streaming back to lower priority.