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    OnBoard Intel or External NIC

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    • ?
      Guest
      last edited by

      So the question is what to choose
      On-board VS External NIC or there is no difference.

      The question should be more likes consumer or server grade NICs.

      i found on ebay some used cards from US
      about 30$
      INTEL PRO/1000 PT DUAL PORT PCIE SERVER NETWORK ADAPTER D50868‑003 EXPI9402PTBLK

      Some of the PT card are having issues, problems and/or running not fine under pfSense.

      and find new one from china about 20$-50$ example:
      INTEL EXPI9402PT PRO/1000 Dual Port Server Adapter PCI-E Network Card 82571 OEM

      This ones can also be fine running but without a guarantee of this!

      but on Chinese ones they put this note
      Note: This card it is 3rd party cards with Intel chip set.

      Perhaps they payed a license fee to Intel
      Perhaps this are original chips and they produce in license
      Perhaps this is a fake and worse the money you want to pay, you only know it really late!

      So its worst to get used one (looks like original) or try a new(Chinese) card with intel chip set.

      An original is an original and will it even be it and refurbished is also an original.

      And a fake will be even a fake, it can be running well, but as said before without a guarantee.

      A third party NIC must not be bad and can also using original chips or is produced in license
      but to be sure that your card will be benefit from the drivers and the given by them features too.
      Here is an example for 3rd party NICs from HotLava

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      • G
        Gruzer
        last edited by

        BlueKobold
        thx for help

        @BlueKobold:

        So the question is what to choose
        On-board VS External NIC or there is no difference.

        The question should be more likes consumer or server grade NICs.

        Not exactly
        you can get server grade board with onboard lan
        (in this case its only matter  how much you wanna spend  )

        what i ask if external lan adapter have benefits over onboard lan
        and  opinion of people who work with different hardware on pfsense platform.

        @BlueKobold:

        So its worst to get used one (looks like original) or try a new(Chinese) card with intel chip set.

        An original is an original and will it even be it and refurbished is also an original.

        And a fake will be even a fake, it can be running well, but as said before without a guarantee.

        A third party NIC must not be bad and can also using original chips or is produced in license
        but to be sure that your card will be benefit from the drivers and the given by them features too.
        Here is an example for 3rd party NICs from HotLava

        fully agree
        i'll never know until  try

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        • G
          Gruzer
          last edited by

          Unfortunately on this forum i can give to every one thanks for they post (only one per topic).
          only find out when i use first time "Thanks you" button

          **kpa
          mattlach
          BlueKobold

          I really appreciate your help**

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          • ?
            Guest
            last edited by

            Not exactly
            you can get server grade board with onboard lan
            (in this case its only matter  how much you wanna spend  )

            This one mostly then came only without a real DSP and/or FPGA/ASIC, only with a LAN chip and are cheaper.

            what i ask if external lan adapter have benefits over onboard lan
            and  opinion of people who work with different hardware on pfsense platform.

            On consumer or desktop NICs you will only have a small chip that is handling the parity of the TCP/IP packets
            On server grade NICs you will have a real DSP (digital signal processor) that is mostly much more offloading
            from the entire TCP/IP workload and packet flow and this is then saving much CPU horse power. And the greater
            ones are sorted with a real ASIC/FPGA that can fully offload network tasks such as VLAN, NAT, ect…...

            And so the price will differ from a small amount to a huge amount for that cards mostly.

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            • ?
              Guest
              last edited by

              Unfortunately on this forum i can give to every one thanks for they post (only one per topic).
              only find out when i use first time "Thanks you" button

              Under each name of a forum member you will be able to click on "applaud" or "smite" to give
              them plus points or minus points how often you want.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • G
                Gruzer
                last edited by

                @BlueKobold:

                Not exactly
                you can get server grade board with onboard lan
                (in this case its only matter  how much you wanna spend  )

                This one mostly then came only without a real DSP and/or FPGA/ASIC, only with a LAN chip and are cheaper.

                what i ask if external lan adapter have benefits over onboard lan
                and  opinion of people who work with different hardware on pfsense platform.

                On consumer or desktop NICs you will only have a small chip that is handling the parity of the TCP/IP packets
                On server grade NICs you will have a real DSP (digital signal processor) that is mostly much more offloading
                from the entire TCP/IP workload and packet flow and this is then saving much CPU horse power. And the greater
                ones are sorted with a real ASIC/FPGA that can fully offload network tasks such as VLAN, NAT, ect…...

                And so the price will differ from a small amount to a huge amount for that cards mostly.

                Now i get more clear image about external and onboard nic, and now i understand why you said that :"The question should be more likes consumer or server grade NICs".
                thx you  for more  detailed explanation about differences.

                i will considering to get an external nic(on more big networks),
                and for home i assume onboard is more than enough?

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                • X
                  xman111
                  last edited by

                  I am running that exact board with an i5 and 16gb of ram.  I'm sure you will run 2.3 but one of the Nics isn't supported in 2.2.6 without a lot of fiddling.  I run both on board nics and a dual PCIe Intel nic and cannot tell the difference.

                  one thing about that board is it takes forever to boot off the USB,  probably 10 minutes or more. be patient,  once up and running,  it is very solid and runs great.

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                  • ?
                    Guest
                    last edited by

                    I run both on board nics and a dual PCIe Intel nic and cannot tell the difference.

                    There might be not difference pending on the traffic that runs through the NIC.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • G
                      Gruzer
                      last edited by

                      @xman111:

                      I am running that exact board with an i5 and 16gb of ram.  I'm sure you will run 2.3 but one of the Nics isn't supported in 2.2.6 without a lot of fiddling.  I run both on board nics and a dual PCIe Intel nic and cannot tell the difference.

                      one thing about that board is it takes forever to boot off the USB,  probably 10 minutes or more. be patient,  once up and running,  it is very solid and runs great.

                      Good to know
                      Yep its will run 2.3.1(or latest one)
                      i hope its will  work smooth out the box without problems

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • E
                        edwardwong
                        last edited by

                        For the same ethernet chipset, onboard might have different performance than the add-on one.
                        There is another thread in this board (the J1900 w/4 LAN port) which shows something we might easily missed during selection.

                        The PCI-e bandwidth sharing can be a problem for LAN chip, some consumer grade device manufacturer might be putting quite a number of devices together on the same lane, somehow for certain low end processors they might be able to provide very limited PCI-e lanes which is not capable to have onboard LAN running at full speed all the time. But for a LAN card occuping separate PCI-e slot, most of the time this is using a dedicated PCI-e lane and so the performance can be guaranteed. Of course you don't need to worry about i3/i5/i7/xeon platform as these CPUs provide plenty of lanes for us while some low end ATOM processors might probably have this issue.

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