onboard network card

[killadoob]

someone told me that i should not use my onboard sound and onboard network

would improve gaming is this correct?

 

[gkm]

Not using onboard sound may help 2 or 3% on a good CPU these days. This was more an issue in the old days when a CPU was maybe 300MHz.

Using the onboard network card will have an even smaller effect.

So overall, after you have spent the money, you are very unlikely to see anything different.

 

[James]

does using a 1Gb on-board network card bypass the PCI-bus therefor giving you a MUCH better preformance or even though it is onboard does it still use the PCI-bus?

 

[gkm]

My knowledge is on shaky ground here, but as I understand it, the onboard network chip also normally attaches to the southbridge chip just like the PCI bus. So, while it therefore probably do not share the PCI bus, is still shares the southbridge connection to the CPU. But I think the onboard LAN does make one get closer to 1Gb throughput on the network.

 

[Bjorn]

It depends alot on the onboard network card aswell, some onboard cards need more CPU cycles to do there work than others. High end Sound cards dont use codecs to play the sounds the have a chip on the sound card that does the processing of sound and therefore use less CPU cycles, so unless you are using High End stuff you wont see much difference, even with it you will only see maybe 5% increase at most

 

[Toxin]

Onboard network shouldn't be too much of a resource hog. Onboard sound is a different matter tho.

I'm thinking of getting myself a Audigy4 to replace my onboard sound. Compared to a decent sound card your onboard sound really sucks.