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Addon NIC cards

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Rattle

Member
Joined
May 12, 2005
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Home... again
This is a question for those that have used them in a gaming environment primarily.

I was thinking about all the gfx cards and sound cards and how we are all about getting the best parts that suit our needs and performance, and I thought of something better than ONBOARD ethernet on our motherboards.

As primarily a gamer would there be any benefit in MP online gaming with a intel addon NIC in the $35-$50 dollar range over all these realtek onboard and marvel controllers? Would I be wasting my money?
 
There won't be any noticeable difference. If you were moving massive amounts of data that required QoS, then it would be a good idea to get one.
 
+1 with Thiddy.

Those Realtek and Marvell ethernet are just fine for gaming purposes, suggesting not to buy those Intel NIC, you won't notice the different, unless the rig is doing "continuous" heavy traffics with heavy cpu load similiar to server's role.
 
+1 with Thiddy.

Those Realtek and Marvell ethernet are just fine for gaming purposes, suggesting not to buy those Intel NIC, you won't notice the different, unless the rig is doing "continuous" heavy traffics with heavy cpu load similiar to server's role.

even then the realtek and marvell nics do quite well... its all i use in my gigabit network and the gigabit it never the bottleneck.
 
Now that nearly all (if not all) motherboards are coming with onboard gigabit controllers, those suffice just fine for almost any task. Games as mentioned on these forums a quite a bit do not depend so much on how much throughput the card has, but on network ping.
 
I wouldn't bother with add on cards even those stupid "gaming nic" cards do nothing for ya.
The thing is that processing the network stack isnt going to dominate the cpu on a modern cpu. I think there was a site that tested that card out and only saw like a 1fps increase but that may have just been in the jitter of the frames anyhow. As for ping, na thats all on your internet connection and distances to the places your connecting. no network card is going to change that
 
^^ That was my point lol... The network ping has more of an effect on your games than an ad on NIC will have :)
 
As said above on-board Gbit NICs are all you really need. The one thing that has helped me the most, as it pertains to my gaming latency, has been prioritizing my Xbox Live traffic. However if you do not have alot of internet traffic to begin with you might not see a difference.
 
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