I am going to a LAN party over the weekend and i am looking for top performance from my Rig. So i have a question about my onboard LAN I have an Asus board with onboard realtek 10/100 Ethernet. Now i cant remeber where but i know someone told me that getting a seperate NIC would Be a better option. Is there any benefits from using a seperate NIC? Thanks

Sean

BTW-I know this seems a bit redicilous but im just really picky!

cpu utilization

the diffrence will be in the cpu utilization of the onbaord nic and the seperate nic,

in my board asus k8n it is designed such that it will take less use of the cpu,

obiviosly a onboard lan card will take more out of ur cpu than a seperate lan card. :bounce:

It can also happen that the onboard NIC has a direct link to the southbridge thus avoiding the slowdown of going through the PCI bus. I always get better transfers via the onboard NIC then through a separate NIC card on the PCI slot.

My onboard is a 10/100/1000 so boo yaa

If your LAN party only has like 5 players I wouldn't worry about it. If you have 20 players, overall network traffic would be the problem, not your individual NICs. For example, if you're running on hubs rather than switches.

Your NIC is the least of your problems unless you are planning to do some major file transfers during the game.

People play games over their internet connections and even a 10Mbit LAN is helluva lot faster and less lagged than any home broadband connection.

And whether an onboard or offboard NIC is better depends on the chip used. Realtek has a history of cheap and dumb (= CPU hogging) chips. Not sure how they rank nowadays.

Thanks

First of thanks for the qucik response. I will keep the onboard, since the differnce would prob. not be a big advantage. Thanks agian


Sean