Is this an ok buy ?

Dicehunter · 25 Dec 2008 at 12:03

Thinking of getting a network card as i read in a few places that its better than onboard.

-( http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp... Desktop PCI Network Adapter (PWLA8391GT-BLK) )-

Caged · 25 Dec 2008 at 12:38

I didn't think a PCI slot was fast enough to max out a gigabit card? (Not that your hard drive is likely to be either).

DRZ · 25 Dec 2008 at 21:34

Intel PRO cards are the only network cards to bother with.

DigitalReaper · 25 Dec 2008 at 21:42

Caged said:
I didn't think a PCI slot was fast enough to max out a gigabit card? (Not that your hard drive is likely to be either).

AFAIK the PCI bus is 1Gbit (shared between everything on it). A modern HD should (barely) be able to max out a gigabit connection. For a proper gigabit connection you really want to be looking at a PCI-E card, although that's not always an option

Aod · 27 Dec 2008 at 09:39

DRZ said:
Intel PRO cards are the only network cards to bother with.

but even then, are they worthwhile over gigabit onboard?

MikeHiow · 27 Dec 2008 at 09:56

DF1986 said:
Thinking of getting a network card as i read in a few places that its better than onboard.

-( http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp... Desktop PCI Network Adapter (PWLA8391GT-BLK) )-

This is ********, if there is any more than a few Mb/s difference in throughput and more than .1ms in latency, I'll be very, very surprised.

nightmare99 · 27 Dec 2008 at 09:59

It depends what card you have onboard? Is it GB and which bus does it sit on most of the modern onboard GB cards are PCI express.

WJA96 · 28 Dec 2008 at 12:17

MikeHiow said:
This is ********, if there is any more than a few Mb/s difference in throughput and more than .1ms in latency, I'll be very, very surprised.

There is much more to network cards than the absolute bandwidth figure. Gigabit ethernet doesn't run at Gigabit speeds, it just has that theoretical bandwidth available. In reality the throughput will be a fraction of the theoretical maximum, but it should be substantially faster than 10Mbps or 100Mbps. If the network card has built-in buffering, error correction logic, it's own CPU etc. then it can be beneficial to get a better one.