Network card? make a differance?

kerrgreg · 10 Oct 2008 at 20:58

Can a seporate network card really make a big differeance?

i was just looking at this and am not sure, will it really make a differance?

if my motherboard has onboard gb lan will a seporate card make a differance even just a £20 one?

i think not but will one that pricy do much more? is it a con?

bigredshark · 10 Oct 2008 at 21:26

Probably not, well not much, the onboard LAN is usually pretty rubbish yes but for most people's uses the add in cards will make sod all difference, any latency improvement isn't going to be much compared to the 20ms+ of a broadband connection. The nice feature of those cards is the ability to run small apps on the card but for that you'd be better spending the £150 on a faster processor...

Dist · 10 Oct 2008 at 23:03

If you do a search on these forums for that network card, you will see that its been discuessed to death that it is simply not worth anywhere near the price they are asking for, and to stay away from it as there is just no need for it.

PhillyDee · 11 Oct 2008 at 00:44

I upgraded from onboard 10/100/1000 gigbit due to poor speeds to an Intel PRO/1000 PT on my home PC and doubled my bandwidth copying large files over my network (3gb). I now get around 45mb/s. Im happy with that, though I am upgrading my home servers onboard shortly too to see if I can get a little bit more. Latency is unchanged in gaming, same as everything else. I really would not have thought that the price of the killer nic card is economical at all.

If you want to upgrade it, go for the Intel PRO/1000 PCI-E x1 adapter. Its still an upgrade, and its not very expenisve.

MikeHiow · 11 Oct 2008 at 08:41

You guys realise that 99% of the time, these onboard chipsets just use the pci bus anyway, so in effect, no real difference.

I can see the advantage of that super-expensive card, but for less than 1ms improvement, it just isn't worth that money.

And the onboard processor? This could have been useful 6 years ago, but in this day an age with 2 and 4 core processors at 3ghz+? What's the point?

hohum · 11 Oct 2008 at 18:46

The Killer NIC can potentially provide a small benefit, but certainly not enough to warrant the price tag. If it sold for about £30-40, then it would be worth a look perhaps... at near £200 quid? Not a chance.

J.B · 12 Oct 2008 at 14:24

If I had a pound for everytime this NIC was discussed, I could buy one!

I wouldn't though.

I like the idea of having an extra 400MHz PU in the machine to run a firewall and things on. I dont think I know anyone who has one. I think the money would be better spent on a new GPU or CPU or RAM.