Use onboard Realtek 8111D Lan or Intel Network Adapter?

[Trigeminal]

Hey all,

Looking for some input. Should I use my onboard Realtek 8111D Dual Lan or Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Network Adapter?

I purchased the intel card when my ISP told my MB was causing the issues with internet, turns out they are idiots. Now I have a new rig. Is there any point to using the add-on card? Should I save myself the trouble of installing another driver and the 4-5 secs it adds to my cold boot?

Let me know what you think.

Trigeminal

Silverstone FT02-B - GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD5 - Core i7 930 - Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme-1366 RT Rev. C CPU Heatsink - Corsair 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 RAM @ 7-8-7-20 - SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5850 - SeaSonic X650 Gold 650W Power Supply - OCZ Agility 2 120 GB SSD - Western Digital Black 750GB HDD - Western Digital Green 2TB HDD - Windows7 x64 - HP LP2465 24" S-PVA LCD @ 1920x1200

[Wonderwrench]

You would think that the Intel NIC would be better but from my experiences with Intel networking products their drivers suck worse than their video drivers do. I have had several and still have two PC's that use Realtek NIC's and they work flawlessly. RTL8111E in my main rig and a RTL8111B in my HTPC. I have never done any bandwidth or CPU usage testing. The Intel NIC may be faster and or use less CPU resources. With the power of today's CPU's CPU usage would be near nothing even if everything was done in software so its not an issue. Bandwidth is another story. It would take some serious testing and hardware to prove which NIC is superior.

I like Realtek products better than most others because they have drivers for almost any OS. They come out with updated drivers often and they support older products near forever. I always use the latest drivers for both sound and NIC downloaded directly from Realtek. Their servers are slow but functional.

Sound drivers http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsCheck.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=14&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Network drivers http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Bill