Jump to content

Why on-board isn't bad...


jcarle

Recommended Posts


Orthos by default runs with LOWEST priority, meaning it'll give away CPU power at any time to any other program that might need it. I want to see a Priority 9 test.

I never said all onboard chips are bad. Onboard VIDEO still sucks though.

Edited by Th3_uN1Qu3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

meaning it'll give away CPU power at any time to any other program that might need it

Bah. I don't really see a point. Onboard NICs are plenty fast as this shows (990mbits/sec), they're quite often PCI-e connected (so almost nothing to gain over that in the first place), and usually have most modern NIC features like TCP checksum offload, large send offload, network boot roms, etc. They also have every other "standard" feature you'd expect out of a NIC or hardware in general (ACPI power states, WOL, etc) CPU usage is very minimal too. Seriously, that's enough for all but the most extreme cases (and then you're usually gonna go for more than one NIC anyways -- and some boards even have dual gigabit NICs too)

I never said all onboard chips are bad.

Others have however.

Onboarvd VIDEO still sucks though.

I still 100% disagree. Non-gaming video suck at gaming, sure. No one's gonna say different. But just like me & cluberti said, onboard video is plenty for a LOT of people (non-gaming usage). I see no difference at all (performance wise) between a pair of $1000 video cards taking 100W each and onboard video. What you seem not to get is that we're not all gamers.

Edited by crahak
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Others have however.

I used to as well. But onboard chips have evolved a lot.

I still 100% disagree. Non-gaming video suck at gaming, sure. No one's gonna say different. But just like me & cluberti said, onboard video is plenty for a LOT of people (non-gaming usage). I see no difference at all (performance wise) between a pair of $1000 video cards taking 100W each and onboard video. What you seem not to get is that we're not all gamers.

You don't need a pair of $1k video cards, as a matter of fact i couldn't afford to spend more than $250 on my video card. However, a $40 card still runs circles around your onboard, uses the same amount of power and can provide useful features like HDMI output for a big display, you said you are watching HD video yourself.

Edited by Th3_uN1Qu3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

a $40 card still runs circles around your onboard

How exactly? And don't say 3D performance as that's 100% irrelevant. I don't see anything wrong with it at all. In short: what makes the $40 card better at things like paying your bills and such.

uses the same amount of power

I very much doubt it, any proofs of that?

useful features like HDMI output

Which are also found on a lot of recent onboard video cards

I think video is gonna go much like the rest of hardware in the long run (onboard), and AMD is paving the way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What about on-board sound? I have an Audigy 2 card, but I notice that the on-board sound is about as good quality-wise. Of course, the Audigy is much nicer in a lot of ways outside of the sound that it delivers, but the question I would have is whether or not most sound cards today would exceed what is on the board for sound for most applications.

Maybe that's the discussion point for this thread - when does on-board become "not enough"?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just to satisfy those who believe that Prime95 wasn't hogging enough CPU during the network bandwidth test, I reran the test using the same conditions except this time I made sure that Prime95 was the only High Priority process (as you'll see in the screenshot) and I actually even beat my last record of 990Mbit/sec and this time topped out at 991Mbit/sec. There's not going to be much more proof as to the inherent strengths of on-board NICs.

On-board NIC Challenge 2

Also, as crahak pointed out, a lot of on-board NICs have all the same features that expensive dedicated NICs do. I'm running a regular consumer motherboard, the ASUS P5Q Deluxe, nothing out of this world at $200 (certainly a lot cheaper then things like the Maximus or other high end gamer boards).

This on-board NIC supports

  • IPv4 Transmit Checksum Offloading
  • IPv4 Receive Checksum Offloading
  • TCP Checksum Offloading
  • UDP Checksum Offloading
  • Large Send Offload
  • 512 Transmit Buffers
  • 512 Receive Buffers
  • 30,000 IRQs per second
  • 9014 Byte Jumbo Frames
  • VLAN tagging and priority

and it's connected on-board through PCI-E ... what more could you want?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

how about a true full load test of a onboard nic against this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...Tpk=killer%2bm1

Wow, and i thought people here actually knew what they are doing... The Killer NIC is one overpriced marketing gimmick. It is cool if you want a mini Linux to play with inside your computer, but it won't magically lower your ping. And it would be $230 vs free, which is an unfair comparison in itself.

What about on-board sound? I have an Audigy 2 card, but I notice that the on-board sound is about as good quality-wise. Of course, the Audigy is much nicer in a lot of ways outside of the sound that it delivers, but the question I would have is whether or not most sound cards today would exceed what is on the board for sound for most applications.

Maybe that's the discussion point for this thread - when does on-board become "not enough"?

If you do not game any, and listen to music through $10 PC speakers, onboard will do fine. When you get a decent speaker system (and i don't mean Logitech) the difference is obvious.

Edited by Th3_uN1Qu3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have an Audigy 2 card, but I notice that the on-board sound is about as good quality-wise.

If you looks at specs, they're very similar indeed.

the Audigy is much nicer in a lot of ways outside of the sound that it delivers

Creative cards have EAX (for gamers), but that's about it. I find onboard codecs like Realtek's are far nicer and FAR more stable (Creative has a LONG history of driver issues). Modern onboard audio also tends to do a lot more little things too, like support for the codecs used by Blu-Ray discs, have 7.1+2 audio, have advanced features like DTS Connect no found even on Creative's most overpriced card, etc. Also, Creative cards tend to be braindead when it comes to interconnects (from proprietary plugs, to sharing the same jack for spdif and mic input and things like that). No need to waste $100 on a card either, and no filling PCI/PCI-e slots for basic functionality.

When you get a decent speaker system (and i don't mean Logitech) the difference is obvious.

Not so. When you have a good speaker system (not one of those $100 5.1 setups), listen to high quality audio (preferably lossless), and also have a high-end card (not just any sound card -- LOTS of them are MUCH worse than most onboard audio), like perhaps a good M-Audio card, then sure there's some difference. On both my setups, my onboard audio beats my old $200 sound card hands down, that card is soon going to be donated.

The REAL place where people NEED sound cards (non-onboard) is mainly musicians, who need their fancy multitrack low-latency ASIO and such (and rich audiophiles, and gamers who can't live without EAX)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here's one for on-board video. 87% of all video driver crashes last month were caused by nVidia drivers. That makes Intel GMA drivers pretty damned stable. And please don't ask for the source of this statistic, I'm not allowed to disclose that information.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here's one for on-board video. 87% of all video driver crashes last month were caused by nVidia drivers. That makes Intel GMA drivers pretty damned stable.

That's what I was saying in the other thread too. They're rock stable. Never one crash, EVER. I wish I could say that about nvidia. And no 50MB downloads full of "extras" (like "helper services" and such things).

There's nothing I need that it won't do. H.264 decoding acceleration would be nice but it's just that, and nowaday's CPUs have no problem decoding that anyway, and getting it to work with some video cards is nigh impossible (this geforce 8600 POS I have advertized the feature, but it never actually worked).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here's one for on-board video. 87% of all video driver crashes last month were caused by nVidia drivers. That makes Intel GMA drivers pretty damned stable. And please don't ask for the source of this statistic, I'm not allowed to disclose that information.

im usually pretty skeptical of statistics like that and use nvidia in any machine i can and i have no problem believing that statistic. Nvidias drivers have come a long ways but I can say that 9 out of 10 BSODs ive seen in the last few years had the text NV*.SYS on the screen. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

im usually pretty skeptical of statistics like that and use nvidia in any machine i can and i have no problem believing that statistic. Nvidias drivers have come a long ways but I can say that 9 out of 10 BSODs ive seen in the last few years had the text NV*.SYS on the screen. :)
That's where the importance of objectivity comes in. I myself use only nVidia video cards and adore them, yet I can still recognize the failure they are at writing drivers, unfortunately.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nvidias drivers have come a long ways but I can say that 9 out of 10 BSODs ive seen in the last few years had the text NV*.SYS on the screen. :)
Don´t we love overlocking? :lol:

Most crashes I see are shaders/core/RAM out of sync (1MHz could mess up a card real bad).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...