T i m wrote:
That would reinforce what I was thinking regarding the poor i/o of a
'std' (onboard NIC) compared with one focused on efficient / low CPU
involvement / server orientated NIC?

Transferring data is a very I/O based task and therefore shouldn't
require much in the way of CPU. So, as long as the hardware involved
was self sufficient (could use DMA etc) then it should offload much of
the CPU load onto the Ethernet card itself (and why the sell such
cards for 'servers' presumably)?

Yes... Intel NICs are the gold standard, they're also less fussy about
drivers because they do more in hardware. Realtek and Marvell NICs are
cheaper and leave more to software.

You can often get Intel NICs for cheap (about a tenner) if you look at
ex-server cards on ebay - some are branded HP, Dell or whatever but look for
the ones with Intel chips.

However if the PC is recent it probably has an Intel NIC as part of the
chipset, so the motherboard may already have that sorted.

Theo