Intel LAN VS Killer LAN

[Ark Law]

I won't buy Killer Lan, or MSI, for that matter.

I'll pay a premium for Asus and Intel, spec for spec.

Might as well buy Biostar/ECS. Cheaper and better. Asus so overhyped and overinflated. They no longer deserve to hold premium pricing in SG, just like Sony.

 

[shadow84]

@Ark Law, u using your Z97 Gaming 5 mobo liao ah?

 

[Assault]

Might as well buy Biostar/ECS. Cheaper and better. Asus so overhyped and overinflated. They no longer deserve to hold premium pricing in SG, just like Sony.

Just to chime in on something entirely unrelated to the Intel-KillerLan war.. but while I definitely agree Asus is DAMN expensive, I think there is some value to knowing what you're buying is at least of a certain quality.

Why I say this, cos I have an Asrock Z87E-ITX (as well as my RIVE), and I sometimes get various stability issues when running high clocks on my i5-4670K - and I don't know if it's mobo-related or CPU.

At least with the RIVE I know most likely if it's unstable it's a CPU thing, some setting voltage-related or whatnot.. Asus does have the best reputation for overclocking-related stuff. It's always good to have one less variable to worry about, if that makes any sense.

Just a random rant, please continue fighting

 

[Ark Law]

Just a random rant, please continue fighting

Rant mode on: I'd rather have to rma a Gigabyte UD board with Intel NIC at CDL than rma an Asus ROG/TUF board with Intel NIC at BL

 

[crystalnox]

The intel PCIe 9301CT cost $30 in amazon sia... Tempted to get 1 and try out.

Btw, my mobo uses the following,

- Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
- Giga PHY Intel® I217V

Can still presume its intel lan?

ASRock > Z87 Extreme4

1. A-Style : Home Cloud, Purity Sound™, HDMI-In
2. Supports New 4th and 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7/i5/i3/Xeon®/Pentium®/Celeron® Processors (Socket 1150)
3. Premium Gold Capacitor Design, Digi Power, 12 Power Phase Design
4. Supports Dual Channel DDR3 2933+(OC)
5. 3 x PCIe 3.0 x16, 2 x PCIe 2.0 x1
6. Supports AMD Quad CrossFireX™, 3-Way CrossFireX™, CrossFireX
7. Supports NVIDIA® Quad SLI™ and SLI™
8. Graphics Output Options : DVI-D, D-Sub, HDMI, DisplayPort
9. Intel® Gigabit LAN
10. 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC1150 Audio Codec), Supports DTS Connect
11. 8 x SATA3, 1 x eSATA, 9 x USB 3.0, 8 x USB 2.0
12. Supports A-Tuning, XFast 555, Easy Driver Installer, FAN-Tastic Tuning, USB Key

 

[shadow84]

Missed that.. I went straight to specifications...

 

[Piezoq]

Might as well buy Biostar/ECS. Cheaper and better. Asus so overhyped and overinflated. They no longer deserve to hold premium pricing in SG, just like Sony.

Asus boards have the best Bios interfaces/features. They also have the best fan control and plenty of PWM headers. Their USB implementation is also generally good (Some boards actually used a USB hub to share the bandwidth between multiple ports).

I have had poor experiences with Gigabyte, MSI and Biostar. Some models are probably appropriate for budget rigs but once you go above $250-$300, there isn't compelling feature-set to make me jump ship... yet.

I've no comment on warranty/RMA. It's a bonus if anything gets fixed satisfactorily in Singapore. It's either a major investment of time (and transport $) or endless waiting. Ever had a rig lie fallow waiting for the GPU to ship from Taiwan?

 

[escksu]

Wow, this thread still ongoing...... Pple still talking about LAN comparison.....

 

[Kairos]

Should this command a premium pricing?!

 

[escksu]

Just my 2 cents on this topic. Please kindly flame me if you think my opinion is wrong.

Intel:
Everyone recommends Intel NICs(just Google). They are rock stable and won't crash even under the most heaviest loads. There's a reason why they cost a whole lot more than other brands and that's because Intel hardware design is top notch and they have one of the best software documentation and support in the industry. Driver can be extensively tuned either for performance or reduce cpu usage or balance of both. In a nutshell you won't go wrong with Intel.

Realtek:
Back in the days of Windows XP/Vista, PCI based Realtek 10/100 controllers were "notorious" for all sorts of network connectivity issues like slow speed, random disconnects or web site not loading. Operating System included drivers if not updated to latest version usually resulted in very poor performance. Flow control and Auto Negotiation often caused alot of performance issues.

However, modern day PCI-E Realtek 1GBe Controllers integrated into most consumer grade systems are actually very good and stable for most home/SOHO usage. They are just as fast as Intel or other brands in terms of throughput and all features like TOE and Checksum offloading are working fine for most usage. However their driver feature set, open-source operating support/features and documentation isn't as good as Intel. If you plan on running a system for mission critical, the general internet opinion is: Don't use Realtek.

Atheros Killer NIC:
What's the point of having a NIC that has increased CPU utilization?

Broadcom NIC:
They are generally fine for normal use, however TOE can cause NIC to stop functioning under very heavy connection load.

Perhaps you can define what is very heavy connection load.....

Cause I don't even know what is very heavy connection load in end user context.......

Btw, I don't even know or even heard before end users need TOE....... No idea what kids are doing to their PCs at home these days.......

Btw, my C5FZ using Intel LAN also but......I don't see my online games any less laggy, download any faster or torrent run any better.......

 

[dqwong]

Perhaps you can define what is very heavy connection load.....

Cause I don't even know what is very heavy connection load.......

As explained here, they are running data centre/web servers:
Broadcom, Die Mutha - Server Fault Blog

Solution:
We are replacing our Broadcom NICs with Intel on our primary production boxes. We replaced one of the NICs with an Intel NIC a couple weeks ago and have not seen either of these problems in that server so we are going to do this with the rest of our servers.

I don’t ever want to touch a Broadcom NIC again. Intel is a company that makes more sense to me anyways as their engineers are more frequently part of what I think of as the fabric of the Internet. Last issue I had with an Intel product I posted on their free mailing list and got a response from an Intel engineer within hours. The best thing to do at this point I think is to take these Broadcoms out to the field:

 

[escksu]

As explained here, they are running data centre/web servers:
Broadcom, Die Mutha - Server Fault Blog

data centre/web servers....

We are talking about end user stuff here..... I have no idea what kind of heavy connection load does a single end user generate.....

 

[escksu]

Btw, I am not a fan on LAN stuff on end-users boards....

I am one of the LAN admins in my company. Playing with DEll servers (use Intel LAN), cisco routers and switches........My dept not that big, only around 50 users..... 2 x 300Mbps connection to internet and 1 x 100Mbps...... all fiber I do understand the need for reliability and performance.

However, I don't see how does it apply to end user who simply do not generate enough load for LAN to make any difference.....

Thats why I dont care about end user LAN specs. But I do prefer Intel LAN cards on my servers.

I am thinking of getting MSI board next for Z97 but I won't be using their Killer LAN software. All I need are the plain drivers.... I dont need VLAN at home......

https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=168097.0

Read the thread above for solution to crappy killer LAN. Thats what I want. Just the drivers, screw the software.

 

[dqwong]

Btw, I don't even know or even heard before end users need TOE....... No idea what kids are doing to their PCs at home these days.......

Btw, my C5FZ using Intel LAN also but......I don't see my online games any less laggy, download any faster or torrent run any better.......

TOE is useful if you are running a custom NAS/router/firewall/webserver using a low power, relatively low performance atom processor.

For normal end user, TOE will help to reduce processor utilization thus helping with system responsiveness/battery. Having a "co-processor" to help with tcp protocol handling is nice to have, although even without TOE, you won't notice much performance impact until you saturate the 1gbe connection with modern day I3/I5/I7 processors.

 

[dqwong]

data centre/web servers....

We are talking about end user stuff here..... I have no idea what kind of heavy connection load does a single end user generate.....

I am not exactly sure, but nowadays techy people do all sorts of "funny" stuff like p2p, multiple video gaming streaming, TOR routing, Virtual Machines, VPN connections, bit coin mining, DVR and etc.

 

[escksu]

TOE is useful if you are running a custom NAS/router/firewall/webserver using a low power, relatively low performance atom processor.

For normal end user, TOE will help to reduce processor utilization thus helping with system responsiveness/battery Having a "co-processor" to help with tcp protocol handling is nice to have, although even without TOE, you won't notice much performance impact until you saturate the 1gbe connection with modern day I3/I5/I7 processors.

Yes I fully agreed that TOE is useful is come situations, the servers in my office using TOE as well.

But as I said, I don't see any end user be able to saturate 1Gbps at all.....

 

[escksu]

I am not exactly sure, but nowadays techy people do all sorts of "funny" stuff like p2p, multiple video gaming streaming, TOR routing, Virtual Machines, VPN connections, bit coin mining, DVR and etc.

I still don't think thats enough though. Pple are getting more crazy these days...

 

[escksu]

Btw, I am trying to say that what applies to servers do not apply to single end users.

In server environment, I would appreciate the reliability and performance offered by Intel NIC but at home, it does not benefit me in anyway.

Same thing for other hardware. I have a dual socket 8 core 64GB Xeon server in office. Although there are 16 cores and 64GB RAM, its even slower than my home PC when it comes to gaming. My games require clockspeed rather than number of cores...... I oc my CPU and my server cannot oc......64GB ram is useless to me in gaming.

Btw, its still using 6 x 15K RPM HDD in RAID 5... not even SSD... so loading is even slower than my 2 x SSD in RAID 0.

 

[escksu]

Thats why I don't see how is the Intel LAN a big advantage in an end user board. Even if you give me Realtek, I also don't mind. Killer NIC is nothing more than marketing... I won't install the software... I only need the drivers to make it work.

For me, I don't install the full software for LAN. I all do is right click on the network adapter in device manager and manually search and install the drivers. I see those extra stuff as bloatware...

Same thing for audio.... I only need the drivers cause I only have a pair of speakers.

Speaking of audio... Supreme FX on the ROG boards are just like killer LAN..... Realtek codec with bloatware.

 

[escksu]

I guess it competition thats making Asus including all the extra stuff to make themselves standout from the rest. Though I feel all these are not needed at all. I don't take them into consideration when I purchase mobo. I only look at overclockability. I don't really care about warranty even.

Anything that affects overclockability I take into consideration. EG MOSFETs, how beefy they are, how good are the components like capacitors used etc....

Thats why I like ROG boards and the MSI M Power boards and I am more than willing to pay a premium for them.