Old Hotness vs. New Plain...ness?

[Logistics]

This is one of those things that I really don't know because I don't study networking hardware. What I'm curious about is which networking hardware to use in my personal system.

My current system uses a P5AD2E-Premium which for on-board network hardware has:

Dual Gigabit/ LAN controllers 2 x Marvell PCIe 88E8053 Gigabit/ LAN Controller, features AI NET2

But I have no use for Gigabit LAN since the router I'm connected to is only traditional 10/100.

So I was wondering if it would be better to install an old, but good Intel PRO 100 S server adapter as IIRC it is one of those cards that does a lot more of it's own processing and alleviates some of the stress on the CPU.

I'm not positive, but I thought I would run this by some of you network-aware guys.

[mariushm]

Re: Old Hotness vs. New Plain...ness?

Those Marvell chips are more powerful than those Intel Pro 100s server adapters.

Being PCIe based, they're also better latency wise and you can tweak them in the driver properties to enable hardware offloading or adjust various settings to make them more "server" like...

[smason]

Re: Old Hotness vs. New Plain...ness?

Stay with the gigabit.
I dunno about most people who say "well my router is only xxx" on MY network, all the wired computers are gigabit into gigabit switches, the router is the router period. Oh and the LAN side of the router is gigabit.

I do pc-pc transfers, move pictures and videos around, do backups etc. and gigabit rocks!

[Behemot]

Re: Old Hotness vs. New Plain...ness?

For many years, I even have the feeling begining with Intel PRO 100 adapters, the low-end and mainstream controllers offload TCP CRC checksuming ONLY. Real TCP/IP offloading is domain of controllers few levels higher. Not that it wouldn't most likely do more than couple % of CPU load even on like dual 10 GBASE-T cards on iSCSi server…

[Toasty]

Re: Old Hotness vs. New Plain...ness?

Super board once you recap the junk off of it.

Stay with the onboard Marvell's. I have 2 of those boards running and never a hiccup with the LAN. One adapter goes internet and the other is internal LAN. Plus, the wireless on board works well too.

Make sure you cool it well.

T