would you get better performance with a seperate nic card as opposed to an onboard nic?
For average home use, I have not been able to tell the difference between an onboard card, and a expansion / riser card.
Unless your doing something like steaming HD videos from your pc to your home TV, transferring large files across the network,,,,, I doubt your going to see a real difference.
If anything, visit speedguide.net, they have some tweaks you can do to squeeze the most out of your existing card. When I was working as a cable modem tech, I saw customers almost double their speed by installing some of the tweaks at speedguide.