Onboard vs pcie NIC - will it lower CPU usage?

chickadee

chickadee

chickadee

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14 Feb 2015
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Hey guys,

I have a decent internet connection, 150mb down and when i'm maxing it out my CPU (i7 920) is usually between 20-60% utilized.

I'm not 100% sure why its so high but I do see that my anti virus software is using up a little bit (10-15%) when downloading, I guess its scanning as I download.

I was thinking of grabbing an intel 1000 pro pci-e card to replace my on-board realtek NIC on my Gigabyte x58 UD5 motherboard.

Do you think it would make any difference on CPU usage?
 
I'd first check to make sure it really is using that much and it's not really something else in the background like the AV you mentioned.

A discrete NIC would be better than the cut down, low-cost integrated Realtek chipset. It would free up the CPU if the Realtek chipset uses system resources via software for the lack of dedicated hardware. It really depends on what you're doing and for the typical home user anything better is just not required and a waste. A dedicated NIC with have a richer feature set. Unless the high utilization is causing problems with something else you're doing on the computer at the same time then I probably wouldn't bother.
 
My CPU doesn't use a fraction of that, and I'm downloading at those speeds over AES256 OpenVPN on a six year old Athlon dual core! As above, I'd look at the AV. Which one is it, out of interest? You'll likely find that the 15% you're talking about is just one aspect - there'll be other processes sucking up cycles too. Try disabling it temporarily and see what difference it makes.

I've got a 1000 Pro GT but I installed the same in my pfSense box and other LAN boxes so it made sense for us. As Rozzy said for a single home LAN machine it's probably not worth it.
 
does your NIC support TCP offload - if so enable it, then the network controller does the processing rather than your CPU
 
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