Switch to Intel nics?

[Flak]

Before I drop my money for these, I wanted to get some other opinions. Currently basing this decision off the untangle forums, who seem to be in agreement that intel nics all around may not speed transfers but would make general network access faster due to much lower latency. My current setup:

Cable modem (60/5 - speed package)
Untangle box (handles routing, dhcp, virus, spyware, ad, pretty much all the freebies)
*Wireless router (this only serves wireless)
Trendnet TEG-S8
All desktops feed off the trendnet switch
All cabling is cat6

All machines, including the untangle box, are using onboard nics. So various models of realtek and marvell gigabit nics.

*Wireless router is currently some zyxel wireless n I had laying around. Had a 4th dir-655 die on me, so I'm done with dlink for awhile. Any suggestions between the TP-LINK WR1043 and Engenius 9850 to replace the zyxel?


Thanks ahead of time.

 

[00Roush]

Well I would agree that the Intel cards are excellent NICs I do wonder if you would really notice much difference in general home usage. What are you trying to improve?

In all of my testing here at home I have not really noticed much of a difference between the NICs I have which are Intel, Marvell, and Realtek. I will say though that I have not really tested for latency. The biggest difference I have noticed is with driver support/updates and native OS support for NICs. Intel is at the top in that regard with Marvell being pretty good and Realtek is okay.

00Roush

 

[Flak]

Honestly I haven't noticed any problems (ever so often the untangle box seems to be hung and has to be powered down). But from reading the untangle forums they have me thinking there is more performance to be had by switching all the desktops to intel nics.

 

[00Roush]

The other day I did a few tests with my server, main PC, and a couple of Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server NICs. Onboard NICs are Realtek and I have another PC that has Marvell NIC onboard. Iperf showed similar speeds (around 940 Mbps) between all the different NICs except when I used the Realtek NIC in my server. I saw around 870-910 Mbps when sending and around 940 Mbps receiving when I used an Intel or Marvell NIC as the client. To see if I could find any latency differences I used IOmeter. When testing with small read sizes of 1k I found that overall the Intel to Intel setup had a bit higher I/O per second. (~10,500 vs 11,000 I/O per second) Latency seemed to be basically the same or maybe .1 ms better for the Intel to Intel setup. Just to be clear though these tests were not really that thorough or scientific. Also all of the clients were running Windows 7 and the server was running Server 2008 R2.

I would say if you are running windows on most of your machines you probably would not noticed much of a difference moving to Intel NICs. If you are using Linux/Unix then Intel NICs can probably make a good difference due to better driver support. Also any computers that have higher network workloads would probably benefit.

Hope that helps.

00Roush