Intel Gigabit Ethernet better than onboard RealTek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet?

[Shou Miko]

Oh, and if you're really serious you'd drop a couple of these in your system:

Intel E10G42BT X520-T2 10Gigabit Ethernet Card 10G...

I set someone up with 2 of those per system a couple weeks back. So far, network connectivity hasn't been a bottleneck. ;-)

i would rather buy a Nvidia IOn with 1gigabit ethernet and put one or 4 ports card in it and than get one of my friends to set it up as my router

i think that will be cheaper than $689.99

 

[Neuromancer]

Oh, and if you're really serious you'd drop a couple of these in your system:

Intel E10G42BT X520-T2 10Gigabit Ethernet Card 10G...

I set someone up with 2 of those per system a couple weeks back. So far, network connectivity hasn't been a bottleneck. ;-)

LMAO.

That is insane

To other people

Gigabit is plenty UNLESS everyone in your house is streaming HD at the same time from different PCs in the house. If from the same PC, then your going to run into storage issues unless your running multi (not 2, not 3, but multi drive) RAID.

As for Intel nics, my testing was done using an Onboard Intel nic same classification apparently, it reads the same Pro 1000, the chip is different (couldn't find any info on the IC used on the ASUS board I reviewed hush hush and all that).

I am not sure where the comment PCI is slower that PCIE came in. Someone is not understanding the difference between a capital and a lower case B I guess. A PCI card might come close to maxing out on gigabit Ethernet. If there is any price difference it is not worth the difference though. $5 for future proofiing? yes maybe. But saving much more than that? Hell go with PCI. Your going to use it for your time frame. It will either die, get thrown or resold. Going PCIE wont get you faster times, and offers no future improvement. Not for saving 50% now.

Geez

Lets not even look into the top PCIE 1x slot sharing resources with USB3... oh and that can be an issue Been there done it. Plug in a USB 3 and lose internet because im runnning a PCIE 1x wireless card...



(**** PCI is slower than PCIE in bandwidth but NOT related to Ethernet afaik. PCI has a max bandwidth of 1.06Gbps)

EDIT: X58 and Server setups with a HW RAID card are different. But OP's ssytems specs are socket 1155 IE limited bandwidth.

 

[erixx]

 

[Neuromancer]

i would rather buy a Nvidia IOn with 1gigabit ethernet and put one or 4 ports card in it and than get one of my friends to set it up as my router

i think that will be cheaper than $689.99

LOL Ion cant handle flash thats why it does not exist anymore. You want to offload network resourcing to it?

Socket 775 setup... now we are talking a CPU based router (since it wont be optimized HW/SW for the job)

Of course, if you are spending that kind of money, you might be one of those people with 20 drives raided for a network share. In which case, your systems might have SSDs and can handle 500MB/s input. So 10Gigabit would be AWESOME.

Home PCs have CPU offloaded everything to make them affordable. (google winmodem if you dont know what I am talking about, its one device but explains everything) Servers dont. CPU is left for server duties and for the longest time, everything else was given enough bandwidth and basically seperate CPUs to do everything. IE, your NIC had a CPU, your USB controller hada CPU your Audio (not needed on a server) but on PCs back in the day.. had a real cpu...)

CPUs have evolved so far, that it is not necessary even for servers to offload everything, which is good since windows network stack is CPU driven anyway. But... people bitch about a $200 single gigabit nic let alone a $200 sound card.

I get it I do.. .I am of the camp that CPU drives everything especially with OCing but I also know that it takes its toll and a BUDGET platform like socket 1155 no matter how powerful is so BW limited it is a budget platform and not meant to last. no matter how awesome it was, it has a p designation for a reason... remember socket 775, and their BW issues withteh FSB?

 

[Deleted member 3]

i would rather buy a Nvidia IOn with 1gigabit ethernet and put one or 4 ports card in it and than get one of my friends to set it up as my router

i think that will be cheaper than $689.99

Yes, but will that get you raw 20Gbit bandwidth?

 

[Neuromancer]

Yes, but will that get you raw 20Gbit bandwidth?

Zing

 

[Completely Bonkers]

A decent Intel NIC will handle error correction on the card itself rather than in software and requiring CPU interrupts and overhead. So for long cable runs the Intel becomes an increasingly better option than an onboard NIC. Most home-consumers are within 10m of their router and it wont make any noticeable difference.

A decent Intel NIC has a hardware buffer and will handle the protocol overhead itself, rather than relying on software and requiring CPU interrupts and overhead. This is very useful when you are using a HUB rather than a SWITCH. But we all use switches nowadays so the work managing contention is at the router rather than at the NIC. However, IIRC when you want to run concurrent multi-point connections, e.g. data from PC A to PC B and PC C simultaneously, then the decent Intel NIC will not stall if B is slow or busy, and will continue data transfer with C uninhibited. I believe an onboard NIC tends to stall more often due to how network stack is managed.

A DECENT ROUTER/SWITCH is also needed. No point having the best NICs if the bottleneck is due to limited bandwidth or delays on the ROUTER/SWITCH.

 

[Mussels]

A DECENT ROUTER/SWITCH is also needed. No point having the best NICs if the bottleneck is due to limited bandwidth or delays on the ROUTER/SWITCH.

thats a key point there. if you arent running decent managed gigabit switches, its pointless. replace a NIC when it fails or becomes outdated (more often with wifi than wired), the performance benefits just arent there for home users.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I am not sure where the comment PCI is slower that PCIE came in. Someone is not understanding the difference between a capital and a lower case B I guess. A PCI card might come close to maxing out on gigabit Ethernet. If there is any price difference it is not worth the difference though. $5 for future proofiing? yes maybe. But saving much more than that? Hell go with PCI. Your going to use it for your time frame. It will either die, get thrown or resold. Going PCIE wont get you faster times, and offers no future improvement. Not for saving 50% now.


(**** PCI is slower than PCIE in bandwidth but NOT related to Ethernet afaik. PCI has a max bandwidth of 1.06Gbps)

Perhaps my math is off:
1Gb = 1000 Mb
1000 Mb = 125MB
PCI runs at a maximum bandwidth of 133 MB/second, assuming there is 0 overhead, nothing else on the bus, and assuming you have an amazing chip that will always perform at maximum speed.

Here is the real world, the 133 MB will rather quickly drop below the 125 MB threshold given regular system losses. Even assuming that you could maintain 125 MB/second, you have to schedule reads and writes of information to RAM and the HDD, so the information has somewhere to go once it is interpretted by the NIC.

On the real planet Earth, and not the ideal one where the laws of physics can be ignored, the PCI bus will not always be more efficient than ethernet communications.


On the other hand:
1Gb = 1000 Mb
1000 Mb = 125MB
PCI-e x1 runs at a maximum bandwidth of 1000 MB/second.

You lose some of the potential of the PCI-e, but the bottleneck is the network and not the connection between NIC and CPU. This is why people suggested that the PCI bus is not fast enough.


While users that connect only to the internet will be far from saturating the 133 MB/s, those with internal networks can see the difference. So in short, not "future proofing" with pci-e is foolish, as the "future" where this bus bandwidth limitation would be detrimental has been around for the last four years.

 

[Mussels]

lilhassel: all that is right except PCI-E 1.0 is 250MB/s each direction, with 2.0 being 500.


it is correct that PCI does not have enough bandwidth to saturate gigabit, which is why even onboard solutions use PCI-E nowadays.

Also... PCI is a shared bus. every PCI device on the system shares that 133MB/s, making it even less likely to reach high speeds.