Pros and cons of having a NIC????
Pros and cons of having a NIC????
You're asking about the advantages and disadvantages of using a non-integrated NIC versus an integrated one. It depends on your needs—integration offers compactness and power efficiency, while a non-integrated option gives more flexibility and potentially better performance. Consider what matters most for your system.
Integrated NICs work well for most users, but sometimes additional cards or separate hardware are needed. The onboard network speed can range from 1 Gbps to over 10 Gbps depending on the chip. Previously, onboard chips were simpler, whereas some cards included features like hardware offloading and acceleration, reducing CPU load—especially during heavy traffic or many connections. In older systems like Athlon XP, Barton, Pentium 4, or D805, you could notice a clear difference between basic onboard cards and more advanced ones when running chat servers or direct connect services with hundreds of users. Devices with optical ports (SFP, SFP+, QSFP28) might be used for NAS or industrial equipment. A dedicated industrial connection can also be made to machines like CNC or pick-and-place devices, or specialized components. If other systems try to access these, they might crash or behave unpredictably, especially during streaming or command transmission. Advanced network cards offer capabilities such as RDMA, which sends data directly to RAM without CPU involvement, or virtual network cards that simulate multiple physical cards for better management.
I was using it for the same reason you mentioned—because I required several ports.
I just watched a Netflix demo yesterday explaining their server setup with a few Mellanox-6 NICs. Each port offers 100gbps, allowing them to deliver up to 400 gigabits of encrypted streams. The encryption happens on the network card’s chip instead of the CPU, which is another smart way to use these cards.
Explore DPUs at https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/20...ssing-unit. Most SOCs on the network card allow processing to happen locally.
Many people ignore how cards like WiFi contain their own SoC. It’s become a time when computers aren’t just single units but multiple ones working together. Interestingly, audio has taken the opposite path—sound cards have become less effective since mixing tasks moved to the CPU. This explains why sound quality varies between Windows and Linux; Linux used to sound better, though it’s hard to tell now.