Onboard or PCI?

spr33ness · 25 Mar 2006 at 11:03

Hi all,

This may seem like a pretty simple question to answer but I'll ask it anyway.

Onboard on PCI NIC? Which is better to use in terms of performance, stability and resource usage?

Thanks in advance.

Duke · 25 Mar 2006 at 11:22

Onboard have been ok for years AFAIK.

MAllen · 25 Mar 2006 at 17:38

I doubt you would spot the difference in most cases. Easiest to use the Onboard as it is already there with resources allocated.

Though I did find an odd issue a few weeks back.... A mate of mine was trying to work out why his two PCs had very different pings when gaming in CS:S over the same ADSL connection. I noticed that on his PC with the lower ping the nVidia onboard NIC had loaded some kind of firewall software. Only problem was it had loaded multiple instances of it and this was having a noticable hit on his pings. I uninstalled it then reinstalled and it all cleaned and worked fine after that.

Curiosityx · 25 Mar 2006 at 18:18

There is no differance they both operate at the same bus speed and neither will even reach full load.

whitecrook · 25 Mar 2006 at 18:48

an onboard nic most likely IS a PCI NIC. (still true for Nforce boards?)

Tha advatage of using a PCI slot is you can upgrade / change / replace /repair , but disadvantage is may take up more space in case / lose a slot / generate mor heat possibly.