# Intel Gigabit Ethernet better than onboard RealTek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet?



## puma99dk| (Oct 12, 2011)

i am wondering if a Dedicated Intel Gigabit Ethernet will be better when i game online, surf and download and upload than the onboard RealTek RTL8111E on my ECS P67H2-A V1.1?

if yes, i have been looking at these PCI and PCI-Express Gigabit ethernet cards ^^;

Intel D33745 PCI-Express x1







Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop Adapter- PCI Gigabit






Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual-Port-Server-Adapter PCI-Express x4


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## btarunr (Oct 12, 2011)

It's lightyears better. Not only is the CPU overhead lower (noticeable browser responsiveness), but Intel chipsets have better physical layer SNR (signal noise ratio). Browser images "look" sharper. BadCompany 2 pings went down by 10%. 

I use Intel EXPI9301CT.


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## t_ski (Oct 12, 2011)

From a professional standpoint, you might see better manageability with the Intel cards than the Realtek.  From an end-user standpoint, probably not.  The best "gaming" network cards are the Killer K1 series, and usually the gains are minimal.

I have been using the onboard NIC (usually Realtek) on my systems for a good ten years, and I've never had any hardware problems (only a couple driver issues).If you had to buy one of the two, I'd say either the Intel D33745 PCI-Express x1 or Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual-Port-Server-Adapter PCI-Express x4.



btarunr said:


> It's lightyears better. Not only is the CPU overhead lower (noticeable browser responsiveness), but Intel chipsets have better physical layer SNR (signal noise ratio). *Browser images "look" sharper.* BadCompany 2 pings went down by 10%.
> 
> I use Intel EXPI9301CT.



How is that possible?


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## puma99dk| (Oct 12, 2011)

i am asking bcs i can get them around 10~20euro used on ebay so i was wondering how much better the Intel chip actually will be for my daily uses and if the Intel Pro/1000 MT PCI will be fine or is the PCI port to slow?


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## lilhasselhoffer (Oct 12, 2011)

puma99dk| said:


> i am asking bcs i can get them around 10~20euro used on ebay so i was wondering how much better the Intel chip actually will be for my daily uses and if the Intel Pro/1000 MT PCI will be fine or is the PCI port to slow?



The short answer can be expressed in 3 points.

1) Integrated NICs are usually passable.  They are the cheaper chips on low to mid range boards, but your internet connection will likely be a smaller bandwidth than your internal networking connections.

2) PCI is too slow for Gb speeds.  They sell them cheaper than PCI-e for a good reason.  Gb networking hardware on a PCI bus is connecting a Ferrari motor to a Geo drivetrain.  You may have a hugely powerful engine (analog to Gb chipset), but the drivetrain can't transfer the energy (analog to PCI bus).  Always go at least PCI-e x1 with Gb networking, always...

3) Discrete networking cards are, at best, difficult to qualitatively justify.  The 10% to 15% specs that people cite generally are difficult to experience in the real world.  If you're going with a big name NIC like Intel, it might be better to go with something like Killer.  The performance increase might be the same, but the pricing could well be lower.


*Edit:  Killer has rather drastically come down in pricing.  Intel remains at about what they were several years ago.  Neither is a bad option, but Killer is finally becoming a reasonably budgeted option.


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## digibucc (Oct 12, 2011)

t_ski said:


> How is that possible?



he said SNR, so to me that means while it is downloading the image there is less interference/noise and so it gets transmitted more accurately than if it had more interference/noise.


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## techtard (Oct 12, 2011)

Get any Pro/1000 PCI-e. I got the Pro/1000 CT and it was much better than my onboard realtek.
Intel are just as good as the Killer NICs. I have friends who tested both, and the Killer NICS are just more expensive than the Intel for comparable performance.
Both brands are better than onboard. But with Killer, you are paying for a lot of hype.

This was with the older Kilelr NICs though. They may have gotten better in the past few years.


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## lilhasselhoffer (Oct 12, 2011)

digibucc said:


> he said SNR, so to me that means while it is downloading the image there is less interference/noise and so it gets transmitted more accurately than if it had more interference/noise.



What?

Analog is the only medium where a color value can be misinterpretted, because of an infinite number of shades.  Digital SNR reflects how much noise can be tolerated with a given signal strength.  It will define how much information can be transmitted accurately over "noisy" lines, and how much information can be received over "noisy" lines.

Claims that a high SNR ratio will allow "crisper" images on web pages are mind boggling.  They demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to digital signal processing, as well as information transfer protocols which make sure our digital signals keep the 1s and 0s in the right place.  

What?   Seriously?


Edit: Apologies.  This may seem angry, but I meant it as anger towards such a massive misunderstanding.  If you make a claim of knowledge, then you had better be ready to defend yourself, or apologize for your stupidity.  Having had to do the later when I used to post quickly, I wish other people would spend the time to research themselves before making a claim.


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## digibucc (Oct 12, 2011)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> What?   Seriously?



i didn't make the statement, i just clarified how i understood it. please calm down.


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## Deleted member 3 (Oct 12, 2011)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> Claims that a high SNR ratio will allow "crisper" images on web pages are mind boggling.



Indeed they are. It's what I get from the statement as well.


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## hat (Oct 13, 2011)

I doubt it. Maybe when connected directly to the modem, _maybe_. If anything, it won't be significant. You might see a better gain by cobbling together some really old computer and turning it into a router with DD-WRT or something like that.


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## puma99dk| (Oct 15, 2011)

hat said:


> I doubt it. Maybe when connected directly to the modem, _maybe_. If anything, it won't be significant. You might see a better gain by cobbling together some really old computer and turning it into a router with DD-WRT or something like that.



i already run DD-WRT on my Buffalo WHR-G125, so already there ^^;


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## Mussels (Oct 15, 2011)

btarunr was just trolling. 99% of the time there is no improvement.


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## puma99dk| (Oct 15, 2011)

Mussels said:


> btarunr was just trolling. 99% of the time there is no improvement.



yap that's why i dumped the idea ^^;


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## btarunr (Oct 16, 2011)

Sometimes discrete LAN cards can help with weak signal (electrical) strength (happens when the cable is too long). Certain onboard chipsets fail to work, or their link-speed/duplex is negotiated lower than the link (eg: 100/full getting negotiated as 10/full).

I get a CAT5 cable directly from the ISP to my place. That cable must be running at least 60 meters to the hub that handles a row of houses in my neighbourhood. That hub basically is a fiber-optic cable modem that gives out some 20-odd downstream links, and links upstream over OFC.


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## PVTCaboose1337 (Oct 16, 2011)

My GBE RTL8111E is a POS onboard so I bought an Intel card off newegg.  Works great.  This is a known shitty chipset with many issues.

EDIT:  This is what I have:  Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Network Adapter 10/ 100/ 1000M...

Does its job fine.  Usenet all day, erry day, (100gb of traffic a day at least!)


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## btarunr (Oct 16, 2011)

PVTCaboose1337 said:


> My GBE RTL8111E is a POS onboard so I bought an Intel card off newegg.  Works great.  This is a known shitty chipset with many issues.
> 
> EDIT:  This is what I have:  Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Network Adapter 10/ 100/ 1000M...


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## Neuromancer (Oct 16, 2011)

I tested the "cheap" realtek nic, vs the expensive HW Intel Nic on the P8P67 deluxe

Realtek was slightly faster (1-2% IIRC), but used up to 3% of a stock 2500K. Intel used less than 1%

Used microsofts TCP testing tool to another Realtek nic.


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## Hunt3r (Oct 17, 2011)

and 3com is good our not..i have one but your chip is 3com


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Oct 17, 2011)

A little while ago newegg was selling Xeno pros for $40. That's $3 more than Intel's cheapest pci-e card. Even if you can't believe there's a performance benefit I'd say it's worth the $3 just for the management software. It's out of stock now but hopefully it'll be back.


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## John Doe (Oct 17, 2011)

There's little to no performance difference between onboard and an Intel NIC. Killer NIC's are junk; both software and hardware wise. They're no more than a gimmick. The NIC's on the images are all based on the Intel Pro 1000 PT, which is an older but still very common NIC. It's made in both PCI and PCI-E flavors. Companies like HP rebrand it. Oh and, comes with or without a heatsink depending on whether it's dual or single port. The PCB is made as dual port, but some cards have one chip while the others have two. I made CrossOver with two Pro 1000's instead of buying a Gigabit router, and it works well. With these said, the only time your pings will decrease is LAN. In WAN, you won't see a performance difference. Maybe a ping or two due to the better load balancing. Most the info in this thread is a joke.

LAN:


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## Hunt3r (Oct 17, 2011)

I think hard the peoples use 1000 in your house.


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## hat (Oct 17, 2011)

puma99dk| said:


> i already run DD-WRT on my Buffalo WHR-G125, so already there ^^;



I didn't mean DD-WRT for the firmware, I meant it as in having a really, really powerful router... many times more powerful than a conventional consumer router. Powerful as in hardware powerful, not features. There's plenty of other router software with a shitton of features if you're into that.


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## theeldest (Oct 19, 2011)

Man that's a lot of fud.

The intel card gives you two things:
1. Better drivers 
2. Less CPU utilization than onboard

Regarding #1. For gigibit ethernet this really isn't an issue anymore. You plug it in and it works. Unless you're doing teaming, need iSCSI support or a TOE on the card the drivers won't matter. (make more of a difference if you're into wireless cards and all that jazz)

Regarding #2. Used to be more of an issue before we had obscenely powerful processors like the 2500k. Only time you'd really *notice* a difference is when you're processor is really bogged down due to a runaway process then your network connection won't immediately die as well.


In reality your system is awesomely highend and about the only component that's 'stock' is your network chip. Spend the money and get one of the Intel Pro cards just because you can and it'll round off a freakin killer system. But don't kid yourself into thinking it'll give you a huge difference, it mostly likely won't.


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## theeldest (Oct 19, 2011)

Oh, and if you're really serious you'd drop a couple of these in your system:

Intel E10G42BT X520-T2 10Gigabit Ethernet Card 10G...

I set someone up with 2 of those per system a couple weeks back. So far, network connectivity hasn't been a bottleneck. ;-)


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## puma99dk| (Oct 19, 2011)

theeldest said:


> Oh, and if you're really serious you'd drop a couple of these in your system:
> 
> Intel E10G42BT X520-T2 10Gigabit Ethernet Card 10G...
> 
> I set someone up with 2 of those per system a couple weeks back. So far, network connectivity hasn't been a bottleneck. ;-)



i would rather buy a Nvidia IOn with 1gigabit ethernet and put one or 4 ports card in it and than get one of my friends to set it up as my router 

i think that will be cheaper than $689.99


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## Neuromancer (Oct 19, 2011)

theeldest said:


> Oh, and if you're really serious you'd drop a couple of these in your system:
> 
> Intel E10G42BT X520-T2 10Gigabit Ethernet Card 10G...
> 
> I set someone up with 2 of those per system a couple weeks back. So far, network connectivity hasn't been a bottleneck. ;-)



LMAO.

That is insane 

To other people

Gigabit is plenty UNLESS everyone in your house is streaming HD at the same time from different PCs in the house. If from the same PC, then your going to run into storage issues unless your running multi (not 2, not 3, but multi drive) RAID.

As for Intel nics, my testing was done using an Onboard Intel nic same classification apparently, it reads the same Pro 1000, the chip is different (couldn't find any info on the IC used on the ASUS board I reviewed hush hush and all that).

I am not sure where the comment PCI is slower that PCIE came in. Someone is not understanding the difference between a capital and a lower case B I guess. A PCI card might come close to maxing out on gigabit Ethernet. If there is any price difference it is not worth the difference though. $5 for future proofiing? yes maybe. But saving much more than that?  Hell go with PCI. Your going to use it for your time frame. It will either die, get thrown or resold. Going PCIE wont get you faster times, and offers no future improvement.  Not for saving 50% now.

Geez

Lets not even look into the top PCIE 1x slot sharing resources with USB3... oh and that can be an issue  Been there done it. Plug in a USB 3 and lose internet because im runnning a PCIE 1x wireless card...



(**** PCI is slower than PCIE in bandwidth but NOT related to Ethernet afaik.  PCI has a max bandwidth of 1.06Gbps)

EDIT: X58 and Server setups with a HW RAID card are different. But OP's ssytems specs are socket 1155 IE limited bandwidth.


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## erixx (Oct 19, 2011)




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## Neuromancer (Oct 19, 2011)

puma99dk| said:


> i would rather buy a Nvidia IOn with 1gigabit ethernet and put one or 4 ports card in it and than get one of my friends to set it up as my router
> 
> i think that will be cheaper than $689.99




LOL Ion cant handle flash thats why it does not exist anymore. You want to offload network resourcing to it? 

Socket 775 setup... now we are talking a CPU based router  (since it wont be optimized HW/SW for the job)

Of course, if you are spending that kind of money, you might be one of those people with 20 drives raided for a network share. In which case, your systems might have SSDs and can handle 500MB/s input. So 10Gigabit would be AWESOME.

Home PCs have CPU offloaded everything to make them affordable. (google winmodem if you dont know what I am talking about, its one device but explains everything) Servers dont. CPU is left for server duties and for the longest time, everything else was given enough bandwidth and basically seperate CPUs to do everything. IE, your NIC had a CPU, your USB controller hada CPU your Audio (not needed on a server) but on PCs back in the day.. had a real cpu...)

CPUs have evolved so far, that it is not necessary even for servers to offload everything, which is good since windows network stack is CPU driven anyway. But... people bitch about a $200 single gigabit nic let alone a $200 sound card.

I get it I do.. .I am of the camp that CPU drives everything especially with OCing but I also know that it takes its toll and a BUDGET platform like socket 1155 no matter how powerful is so BW limited it is a budget platform and not meant to last. no matter how awesome it was, it has a p designation for a reason... remember socket 775, and their BW issues withteh FSB?


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## Deleted member 3 (Oct 19, 2011)

puma99dk| said:


> i would rather buy a Nvidia IOn with 1gigabit ethernet and put one or 4 ports card in it and than get one of my friends to set it up as my router
> 
> i think that will be cheaper than $689.99



Yes, but will that get you raw 20Gbit bandwidth?


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## Neuromancer (Oct 19, 2011)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Yes, but will that get you raw 20Gbit bandwidth?



Zing


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## Completely Bonkers (Oct 19, 2011)

A decent Intel NIC will handle error correction on the card itself rather than in software and requiring CPU interrupts and overhead. So for long cable runs the Intel becomes an increasingly better option than an onboard NIC. Most home-consumers are within 10m of their router and it wont make any noticeable difference.

A decent Intel NIC has a hardware buffer and will handle the protocol overhead itself, rather than relying on software and requiring CPU interrupts and overhead.  This is very useful when you are using a HUB rather than a SWITCH. But we all use switches nowadays so the work managing contention is at the router rather than at the NIC. However, IIRC when you want to run concurrent multi-point connections, e.g. data from PC A to PC B and PC C simultaneously, then the decent Intel NIC will not stall if B is slow or busy, and will continue data transfer with C uninhibited. I believe an onboard NIC tends to stall more often due to how network stack is managed.

A DECENT ROUTER/SWITCH is also needed.  No point having the best NICs if the bottleneck is due to limited bandwidth or delays on the ROUTER/SWITCH.


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## Mussels (Oct 19, 2011)

Completely Bonkers said:


> A DECENT ROUTER/SWITCH is also needed.  No point having the best NICs if the bottleneck is due to limited bandwidth or delays on the ROUTER/SWITCH.



thats a key point there. if you arent running decent managed gigabit switches, its pointless. replace a NIC when it fails or becomes outdated (more often with wifi than wired), the performance benefits just arent there for home users.


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## lilhasselhoffer (Oct 19, 2011)

Neuromancer said:


> I am not sure where the comment PCI is slower that PCIE came in. Someone is not understanding the difference between a capital and a lower case B I guess. A PCI card might come close to maxing out on gigabit Ethernet. If there is any price difference it is not worth the difference though. $5 for future proofiing? yes maybe. But saving much more than that?  Hell go with PCI. Your going to use it for your time frame. It will either die, get thrown or resold. Going PCIE wont get you faster times, and offers no future improvement.  Not for saving 50% now.
> 
> 
> (**** PCI is slower than PCIE in bandwidth but NOT related to Ethernet afaik.  PCI has a max bandwidth of 1.06Gbps)



Perhaps my math is off:
1Gb = 1000 Mb
1000 Mb = 125MB
PCI runs at a maximum bandwidth of 133 MB/second, assuming there is 0 overhead, nothing else on the bus, and assuming you have an amazing chip that will always perform at maximum speed.

Here is the real world, the 133 MB will rather quickly drop below the 125 MB threshold given regular system losses.  Even assuming that you could maintain 125 MB/second, you have to schedule reads and writes of information to RAM and the HDD, so the information has somewhere to go once it is interpretted by the NIC.

On the real planet Earth, and not the ideal one where the laws of physics can be ignored, the PCI bus will not always be more efficient than ethernet communications.  


On the other hand:
1Gb = 1000 Mb
1000 Mb = 125MB
PCI-e x1 runs at a maximum bandwidth of 1000 MB/second.

You lose some of the potential of the PCI-e, but the bottleneck is the network and not the connection between NIC and CPU.  This is why people suggested that the PCI bus is not fast enough.


While users that connect only to the internet will be far from saturating the 133 MB/s, those with internal networks can see the difference.  So in short, not "future proofing" with pci-e is foolish, as the "future" where this bus bandwidth limitation would be detrimental has been around for the last four years.


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## Mussels (Oct 19, 2011)

lilhassel: all that is right except PCI-E 1.0 is 250MB/s each direction, with 2.0 being 500.


it is correct that PCI does not have enough bandwidth to saturate gigabit, which is why even onboard solutions use PCI-E nowadays.

Also... PCI is a shared bus. every PCI device on the system shares that 133MB/s, making it even less likely to reach high speeds.


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