Does brand effect performance of NIC's???

JayMan · March 29th, 2002, 04:43 AM

I've currently got cheapo brand 10/100 NIC's in my PC's @ home, i recently came across 3 "Intel Pro/100" NIC's, i was wondering if its worth me swapping the NIC's around to these Intel ones.

Would i see better network performance? Better pings (i'm on cable, my cable modem is currently connected to a SMC card, but my LAN is running on the cheapo cards) from my LAN'd PC to the internet etc.....

Thanks!

JayMan

KenKun · March 29th, 2002, 04:52 AM

I would say, go for it ...

I noticed a performance increase after i upgraded from cheapo to Intel Pro/100 card ...
It has nice drivers that make you control and tweak the card`s settings, so you can take the best out of your cable

...

Gaming, surfing and file sharing were all improved after the upgrade (in my case) ...

Very nice card ..

Regards

<edit> i would say the increase was about 20~40% most of the time ...

JayMan · March 29th, 2002, 04:58 AM

Also, how can i tell exactly which card i've got.

On the mounting braket part (with the activity lights) it says "Intel PRO/100", they look like they are PCI, and the big "intel" chip has this writing on it:

SB82558B
L819ID80
SL2P4

Another medium size chip is labelled

Pulse
H1012
9822-C China

Umm is there anything else i can look for to identify these cards?

Thanks

JayMan

JayMan · March 29th, 2002, 05:01 AM

Ok kewls, KK, do u reckon i should replacing even the SMC card (hooked to cable modem) with the intel or just my cheapo's?

Basically i have 3 intel's, i i've currently got 1 SMC hooked to cable modem, and 2 cheapo's connecting both my computers with a x-over cat5 cable.

JayMan

otheos · March 29th, 2002, 05:03 AM

Performance is not really affected by brand in terms of bandwidth (or use of it). What is different is the latency of the chips. The Intel has lower latency than the RealTek 8139 series so you might get some difference out of it, definitely not noticeable.

BTW the SiS900 controller currently offers the lowest latency, so if you're after the absolutely fastest 100Mb/s controller you gotta got with SiS.

otheos · March 29th, 2002, 05:04 AM

BTW, Jayman I can't help seeing your avatar as a purple octopus

JayMan · March 29th, 2002, 05:18 AM

Ok, my current cheapo NIC's i'm not even sure what brand they are or anything.... My win2k machine is using drivers that win2k installed itself, "Macronix MX98715 Family Fast Ethernet Adapter (ACPI)". And my win98se box is using the drivers that came with it, which are loaded as "PCI Fast Ethernet". I've got the box here and it says "Skymaster Ethernet Adapter".

So, would the intel's have better latency than the cheapo cards i have? Or are these cheapo cards actually decent?

JayMan

otheos · March 29th, 2002, 05:22 AM

If they use the Realtek chipset (8139 for 100 or 8129 for 10Mb/s) they are decent.

You can try the intels and copy files across and time them to see any difference (I doubt it).

You can always sell the intels at ebay (the go for decent prices as they carry the name) and use the dough elsewhere

JayMan · March 29th, 2002, 05:45 AM

I wanna try to get my ping down alittle for online games, wonder if my SMC card is just not up to it.

And i'm thinking my cheapo cards use a macronix chipset????

JayMan

KenKun · March 29th, 2002, 07:02 AM

You know .. maybe because i tweaked within the card's settings, buffers transmit control blocks and many other settings ...

Reaction and the response was different, i can tell ... beside benches showed increase ....

As i told you, it was in my case so you might not see anything different with the new card than the older one ...

Check this page for more info on drivers and how to use them and other stuff ...

http://www.intel.com/network/connect...pro100mgmt.htm

Regards