T i m wrote:
And that was my point Theo. An onboard NIC for a basic desktop may
well have a 'lame' NIC AFA Server duties might be concerned but it
could also be perfectly adequate for a std desktop role?

So that was the point ... if we are taking basic desktop hardware and
turning them into servers (as I and others here seem to have done),
*could* we be limiting the maximum output from the server by not
fitting a 'better' NIC?

There are some different cases:

Recent Intel CPUs have an onboard Intel NIC. That's no point replacing
that.

Older boards may have a discrete NIC chip from a random vendor
'Embedded' stuff may have a discrete NIC (Atoms, Microservers, etc) because
they don't have one on-die, and the board vendor may have chosen a cheap one
Extra NICs may not be Intel (eg a recently purchased 'gaming' board has one
Intel and one Realtek)

If you have heavy workloads, or are worried about drivers, then replacing
make may sense in the latter group. But what I'm getting at is it doesn't,
in general, make sense to buy a new PC and immediately replace the NIC.
Unless you picked a particularly lame PC to begin with.

I though I had seen an add-on NIC supplied with a small cable that
allowed it to do that (or maybe it was for something else)?

Some are, some use one of the existing ports via the BMC CPU (usually an
ARM). Sometimes you have to add a 'key' with firmware or a licence code,
but the functionality is already on the mobo.

So, 10 workstations steaming video from a real server and the same
streaming from a basic Atom board will see the same throughput on the
'server' NIC (genuine question).

For simply pushing packets out the door (eg as a router), 1G is probably the
bottleneck. If you're doing other work (like fetching that stuff off disc,
encoding, etc) then sooner or later you'll run into headroom issues, but
they likely aren't due to the network stack (on *nix anyway, I don't know
about Windows).

Replacing the on-board NIC on the Atom board with a server specific
NIC wouldn't improve matters at all (assuming the data bottleneck
wasn't elsewhere)?

It may help - don't underestimate how bad it can be made due to
cost-reduction. But that's different from the original question of swapping
the onboard Intel NIC for an add-in Intel NIC - there's no point.

Theo