Onboard Lan -vs- Dedicated Network Card

Onboard Lan -vs- Dedicated Network Card

Yes It Works.

It's still an argued topic over the years so I did my own testing and recording. During research I found a video that really shows some really nice MMO loading times as well. If you watch the right side, the onboard network adapter shows tons of stuttering and choppy loading objects. The video Clearly shows the difference between onboard and a dedicated network card.

The video on the right is me doing a demonstration of a Free to Play Need for Speed World. Simply put, I went from 70-110 fps to 100-160fps. No files were cached because I reboot the system between each test. Now, in other games there was some really nice performance gains as well. Such as a very heavy shooting fps game. Like a 64 player bf3 crazy server. Those crazy fire fights with close quarters shooting became alot more stable and I was able to shoot properly because all the data coming in was being handled properly. In some MMO games I noticed load times and large map stuttering were completely gone.

Now I'm not saying go out and get the best NIC card in the world. I bought a high quality standard intel network card for $30 USD and I also bought The BigFoot Networks Killer Nic 2100. Basically ones prettier than the other but they both do the job way better than on-board can. Although, after I sold the Killer NIC I found online someone was able to bypass the windows network stack using it and had some pretty amazing results, but I'll leave that up to you to find. Also, some motherboards are starting to come out with better network chipsets that are competing with dedicated network cards but I havent seen any benchmarks that have beaten a dedicated card yet, maybe one day.

Here's a link to a pretty common and standard NIC you can pick up on amazon with my affiliate link.