Onboard LAN or dedicated card?

[kyzen]

I've always used my onboard LAN port for networking purposes, but I've recently heard that getting a dedicated NIC can increase network performance. I tend to move a lot of large files around my home network on a somewhat regular basis, so I'm curious if there's any truth to what I've heard; cuz if so I'll need to purchase half a dozen gigabit NIC's

So - fact or crap?

 

[Agamar]

If you get a good, higher-end dedicated card (some of the Intel cards, etc) and get a switch that can accept jumbo frames, and enable jumbo frames on all your cards, you might get better performance. Kind of pricey for the intel nics though.

 

[JackMDS]

If you Onboard NICs are Giga, and you are running peer-to-peer network all you need is a good Giga Switch.

The difference on a peer-to-peer Network between the Onboard Giga and an expensive stand alone Giga card is negligible.

If you are on a real server topology and run heavy Network applications (like SQL server) used by multi users then expensive good cards can make a difference.

On the other hand just like the RAID craze, many users while they do not really benefit from the technology are benefiting emotionally from the psychological effect that they have something special. So YMMV.

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: JackMDS

On the other hand just like the RAID craze, many users while they do not really benefit from the technology are benefiting emotionally from the psychological effect that they have something special. So YMMV.

:laugh:

 

[Cooky]

In SOHO networks it doesn't matter much.
In enterprise networks you'd use both onboard & dedicated NIC's to form a NIC team for performance & redundancy.

 

[Madwand1]

Even the cheapest NICs can be shown to do more than 750 Mb/s in synthetic tests with some tuning effort, which is more than what typical Windows file transfers do even with the highest-end server NICs. From this point of view, there isn't a strong argument for NIC swapping. The typical case is much worse, and the bottleneck is generally not the NIC or other parts of the network, but the OS, drive subsystem, and other hardware / software.

It's possible for some NICs to simply perform better than others in adverse conditions such as bad cabling and it's possible to mess up anything, so it's possible to have untuned drivers, bad NIC settings (e.g. duplex mismatches), or even bad connections, which can appear to magically improve when you drop in a replacement with new drivers and default settings.

It's also possible for some older hardware/software platforms to be so constrained that even a 10 GbE NIC (if a compatible one could be found) would give virtually no performance improvement.

 

[McLovin]

Figured I'd throw my question in here since its relevant to this discussion and I've always been curious. I have A8N-32SLI Deluxe which does have onboard Gb LAN. I have that disabled and use a D-Link DGE-530T which is a PCI 10/100/1000 NIC. I have always used the card because I had believed this would be a better choice. I realize now that the onboard NIC would use the PCI-e bus instead of the D-Link which would be running on the PCI bus. Would/Can this make a difference on how my network performs?


I just wired my house with Cat6 and ordered an un-managed D-Link Gigabit switch so my other questions would be does the onboard lan support jumbo frames? If I run jumbo frames and another computer/xbox on my network doesn't support jumbo frames or is even gigabit capable, will that effect the network at all as far as connectivity goes?

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: BillyAZ1983
I realize now that the onboard NIC would use the PCI-e bus instead of the D-Link which would be running on the PCI bus. Would/Can this make a difference on how my network performs?

In theory, the on-board would be better, but there might be quirks in practice, and in any case, you might not be able to see a difference in actual usage as opposed to benchmarks.

I suggest downloading the latest drivers from Marvell and testing the performance. You can use iperf version 1.7 for example:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

where server is the name of the remote computer running iperf -s.

Originally posted by: BillyAZ1983
does the onboard lan support jumbo frames? If I run jumbo frames and another computer/xbox on my network doesn't support jumbo frames or is even gigabit capable, will that effect the network at all as far as connectivity goes?

You can check for jumbo frame support by looking at the Advanced properties for the NIC. If you don't see an option called "Jumbo Packet" or something like that, then it doesn't have support for jumbo frames in your installation.

In theory, everything in a local network should be configured to support the same maximum packet size. In practice, esp. for home networks, because of the TCP MSS exchange, you can usually get away with mixed frame sizes.

 

[McLovin]

Ok, I will try that! But it looks like the website where you can get 1.7 is down. Are the later versions ok to use or was there a specific reason you recommended 1,7?

 

[McLovin]

Ok found a newer version and downloaded it. I tried to use it and I realized this is a Unix/Linux program. Any suggestions for Vista x64? I guess I've never really screwed around with linux so I am not familiar with it.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: BillyAZ1983
it looks like the website where you can get 1.7 is down. Are the later versions ok to use or was there a specific reason you recommended 1,7?

Yes, there have been some later packages which I found to have unreliable results. You can still find the 1.7 version iperf.exe buried in the jperf 2.0.0 package off SourceForge. This version is usable in Vista, but you have to run it as administrator -- e.g. Start / All Programs / Accessories / right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator. Do it on the "server" first and type in the command iperf -s (and allow Vista to unblock the ports when prompted).

Similarly on the client, with the other command line: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

 

[McLovin]

Yeah I figured out that I need to run it in a command prompt and dint edit my post lol. I was able to run iperf and it says there is a 1 Mb difference between the two. mind you I dont have my gigabit switch yet so this was on a 10BaseT network, but Im thinkin that it would be ok now to run my network off the onboard. Thanks for your help madwand


*edit* just to be clea with the jumbo frames thing, eveb if some of the computers on the network are only 100 Mb conenctions that dont support JFs everything should still work right?

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: BillyAZ1983
just to be clea with the jumbo frames thing, eveb if some of the computers on the network are only 100 Mb conenctions that dont support JFs everything should still work right?

Yes, that would be no different from the case where one gigabit NIC does not support jumbo frames.

 

[JackMDS]

No point to use Jumbo Frames if the computer is also uses the Internet.

With Jumbo Frames MTU is set at about 9000 which is Not good for BroadBand connetion that needs MTU of about 1500.

 

[Madwand1]

The MSS exchange takes care of that, assuming that the other end is not also trying to transmit jumbo frames.

 

[McLovin]

Well that's what I am worried about. I would have 4 units on the network capable of doing gigabit networking w/ jumbo frames and an xbox 360 (not sure if thats even capable of gigabit networking TBH), all of which would be on the internet, are you stating that if the other computers/servers out on the net also try to transmit jumbo frames to me or vice versa I would have a problem?

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: BillyAZ1983
are you stating that if the other computers/servers out on the net also try to transmit jumbo frames to me or vice versa I would have a problem?

It's possible, but very unlikely -- it requires something else on the Internet to be wrongly configured to support jumbo frames, despite the Internet in general not supporting jumbo frames. Even if this situation arises, there's a good chance that a router in the path (perhaps your own) will fix the problem.

I've had jumbo frames enabled for a couple of years and have had no issues with Internet access.

 

[McLovin]

Thats exactly what I wanted to hear! Thank you sir