• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Network Card Processor

Joined
Dec 30, 2009
Messages
204 (0.04/day)
Location
Lower Sackville, NS
System Name ThinkPad T410
Processor Intel Core i5 540M
Motherboard Lenovo 2522DM1
Cooling Stock
Memory 8GB DDR3
Video Card(s) nVidia NVS 3100M
Storage 128GB SSD
Display(s) 1440x900
Software Windows 8.1 64bit
How can I tell if my Network card will do all the processing itself, relieving the CPU of doing so? ie How can I tell if it has its own processor?
 
How can I tell if my Network card will do all the processing itself, relieving the CPU of doing so?
What you're looking for is a feature called a TCP Offload Engine (TOE). Microsoft refers to it as TCP Chimney Offload and I do not believe it is yet widely adopted or free from issues.

Have a look at this article:
Information about the TCP Chimney Offload, Receive Side Scaling, and Network Direct Memory Access features in Windows Server 2008
How can I tell if it has its own processor?
As far as I know they all do but not all of them support TOE.
 
Last edited:
I have never used one of these NICs myself but Bigfoot Networks claims to have NICs that bypass the Windows network stack and offload from the cpu.

Bigfoot Network
 
ok, thanks guys i am reassured now.
 
Back
Top