10MB intel ethernet card vs gigabit onboard

what do u mean use? are u useing it to connect it to the internet?

1 gigabit lan card would lower ur ping sence it sends more per second

so if these are onboard u have to switch the cpu or what are u talking about?

My motherboards integrated NIC is gigabit ethernet.. but i disabled it so my CPU (Opteron 144) doesn't need to deal with it...
(and used a PCI 10MB card)

I very much doubt the 10MBs card you have offers full TCP/IP offload - so they are both using your CPU..

I would just stick with the GB card tbh...

Why don't you just test and see? Try with both and show the results. Personally I doubt that there will be a significant difference, the gigabit NIC is probably running at 100 Mbit since that is what your router port is, and the 10 Mbit NIC might take some load off the CPU but will have slightly lower network performance. The difference would probably be in the .02-2 ms range, nothing compared to the latencies of your cable modem and the internet.

Also, ethernet has a lot of overhead. Point to point on a switched network isn't as bad, but you can still expect to see 30%+ overhead, so 'only' getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth of your 10 Mbit connection means it will be closer to 80-90% utilized.

Pull out the old 10MB card and just use the onboard. It also has a tiny chip controller, and of course a driver, just like the PCI card. Your CPU performance won't be impacted in the slightest amount by using the onboard port. And as mentioned above, it's all running much faster than your ISP connection. Adding just 128MB of RAM would boost your Windows performance more than what you are testing.

your post is confusing!

MB = megabyte where as Mb = megabit big difference there buddy!

also, just use the onboard nic. Your network will allow whatever speed it's designed for (ex. 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1000Mbps, etc.) However, your internet provider only allows the maximum that you posted.

If you do a lot of file transfers or are a heavy network user, stick with gigabit network, otherwise, I don't think it'll matter when it comes to games which nic you use.

I say go with your on-board gigabit card.

First, your gigabit card is almost not utilising your CPU anyway. I'd say much less than 1%, so really no sweat there. I can't tell about your 10MB one, but it's surely not lower and probably higher.

Second, rated output are theorical. Your 10Mb is probably getting close to it real limit that is most probably about 6 mbps. On the other side, your NVidia gigabit ethernet is hardware and get close to 80% efficiency, putting it close to 800 Mbps real. This assure you won't get any slowdown whatsoever. Of course, if you're on a router, there is a great deal of chance it's running at 100 Mbps anyway, but it'll be much better.

Two things need to be looked at here. First both the onboard NIC and PCI
slot NIC are treated as PCI devices, ie. they're assigned PCI DMA / IRQ
resources and are enumerated on the various PCI busses. Your can get
various PCI query tools off the web that will tell the bus, slot, ID, etc of each
device. This info will tell you how many and what type of each device is being
handled by the PCI controllers. Second, is driver updates and optimizations.
The older 10mb card driver probably hasn't been updated or rewritten to
optimize its performance as well as the gigabit NIC. There are alot of points
to consider if you're trying to decide if the 10mb card will outperform the
1000mb card for your setup. PCI bus contention, IRQ/DMA sharing, etc.

Rule of thumb: Use the fastest NIC you have with the latest drivers. I've
seen some switches / hubs that work fine with 100/1000 mb NICs but have
noticable throughput problems with older 10mb cards.

Doesn't matter, both are much faster than your internet connection and neither will be using enough CPU time to make a difference.

Use whateve you want.

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And the efficency numbers for 10mbps cards are much higher than people are saying. Maybe they are using bad switches/hubs?

PS don't forget bandwidth is measured using standard metric prefixes not the binary prefixes that files sizes are typically measured in.

So you need to convert binary prefixes to metric prefixes and bits to bytes to get the math right.

Save your slot for later. Use the on-board.

Ethernet "efficiency" results you see published are for real ethernets, not for home networks with at most a couple or 4 computers attached. For a small network, ethernet efficiency is very high. Unless your hardware has issues, your 10Mbps card should be delivering very high actual throughput, which will be comfortably higher than your internet connection speed.

true. Though some of the newer boards have onboard audio and eithernet on its own pci-express lane.

Worth a quote. very true, and correct.

Use either as they'd be similar in performance in accessing the Internet. But there won't be a difference in CPU time. The CPU time taken to shuffle a mere 5 Mbps over a network is pretty minimal, even with an integrated NIC. Heck, I use my NForce4 integrated card hooked up to a gigabit router and push 30 MB/sec around and only use about 10% of the time on one CPU core. My laptop has a gigiabit PCMCIA card as well as the onboard 10/100 and the integrated NIC uses exactly the same amount of CPU time as the PCMCIA card when both run at 100 Mbps. (Of course the GbE card will use more when in gigabit mode and tranferring at >100 Mbps.)

However if it were up to me, I'd use the integrated NIC as it's likely talking to the router at 10 times the speed of the 10 Mbps card. If you have anything else on the LAN that you talk to, such as other computers or a NAS device, and you will be far faster using the integrated NIC at 100 Mbps than the PCI card at 10 Mbps. You'll have ~90% of your bandwidth left over to talk to the LAN when you're doing a download versus a little under 50% on the 10 Mbps card.

And to the person who quoted throughput rates of NICs, here's what most can throughput as raw data:

11 Mbps wireless: at best about 4-4.5 Mbps
54 Mbps wirleless: at best about 20-23 Mbps
10 Mbps NICs: ~9.5 Mbps
100 Mbps NICs: 92-97 Mbps
1000 Mbps NICs: varies widely, generally you'll see about 500-700 Mbps with tweaking, 200-300 Mbps out of the box.