Does a wireless dongle affect CPU use more than a network card?

Little*Freak · 18 Mar 2015 at 21:36

Hi, just a general question about wireless dongle usage.

Does it use a significant amount of CPU time?

Is the difference between a USB Dongle, a Network card or the Ethernet adapter on the motherboard noticeable on general PC performance?

Many thanks in advance.

Randall8686 · 19 Mar 2015 at 06:56

Yes it does, by how much i dont know. However keep in mind if gaming if your cpu is flat out then lag will also increase, if you have to go wifi go pci card.

snips86x · 19 Mar 2015 at 07:10

Randall8686 said:
Yes it does, by how much i dont know. However keep in mind if gaming if your cpu is flat out then lag will also increase, if you have to go wifi go pci card.

What do you mean by flat out?

There isn't any game which will push your CPU to 100% as they wouldn't use all threads/cores.

lude1962 · 19 Mar 2015 at 08:58

snips86x said:
What do you mean by flat out?

There isn't any game which will push your CPU to 100% as they wouldn't use all threads/cores.

There probably is but the OS wont allow it, as everything else would stop.

Ch3m1c4L · 19 Mar 2015 at 13:15

unless youre on a really old cpu, it will be a negligible difference. If your CPU is so loaded that it can't do the network stuffs, you need a new cpu/lower in game settings, as other things will be affected too.
Its not like the old days where a network card could improve fps a bit by offloading it from the cpu, when cpus were in the hundreds of Mhz, and had much worse per clock performance.

lamboman · 19 Mar 2015 at 14:07

No difference whatsoever in reality. The only difference you'll notice will be latency, which is easy to test (just ping your router). Mine shows only a 2ms difference - frankly if you believe that a 2ms difference makes all the difference between winning and losing, you're probably the type to rage-quit

Rozzy85 · 19 Mar 2015 at 18:12

Integrated sound, ethernet and USB devices will substitute hardware (which is why they're cheaper) via software using up CPU cycles. The whole Killer NIC thing was marketed around this. It only becomes a problem when the CPU is utilised near to 100% on all cores which will rarely happen for most people. It was more of an issue with single core CPUs.

If you're just gaming and nothing else then it's not going to make much difference. Background applications could cause blips but nothing serious. I'd be more concerned about the quality of the dongle itself, the antenna and drivers.

Little*Freak · 19 Mar 2015 at 18:27

Thank's very much for your replies, you've all been very helpful.