Onboard Realtek NIC - No lights?

#11

Franc Zabkar wrote:

Quote:

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:19:51 GMT, Bill <bbaka (AT) comcast (DOT) net> put finger
to keyboard and composed:

some snips
Franc Zabkar wrote:
Now
you appear to be saying that NICs *do* in fact have their own CPU,

Don't mis-quote me. How much processor do you think is on a generic $10
card? Not much.

Well, for $30 I can buy a DVD player with a PSU, case, VFD, DVD
loader, RAM, flash EEPROM, remote control, etc, etc. Within that
package is an MPEG4 capable decoder chip which probably has ten times
the processing power of a $10 NIC. So no, I wouldn't be surprised to
find that I could buy a Gigabit NIC for around $10.

I have an older 3C905 and it just appears to have a fancy ASIC on it.
Whether part of that is a processor is debatable. That card seems to
show up more often than not.

Quote:

but
that the more expensive ones have an additional co-processor to
support non-standard features such as hardware based security. If
that's the case, then it seems to me that you are bagging a Volkswagen
for not being a Porsche.

My comment on cheap junk on the MBs holds.
AFAICT, a typical NIC that sells for about $10-15 has the exact same
hardware as what is on a motherboard (other than a boot ROM socket).

If it is $10-15 on a 10/100 NIC then it is probably less than $5 on
parts on a motherboard. How cheap they can go, I do not know.

Quote:

No Duh, Ralph.
That's why I was hinting at not using the el-cheapo or whatever crap
they put in there and choose your NIC, same as a sound card or video.

I used to buy all my stereo equipment as components, too. If one thing
blew out I didn't have to throw away a $2,000 stereo. Things always seem
to break right after the warranty runs out. Different story!

Quote:

- Franc Zabkar
Bill Baka
Remember that ***ANY*** load your CPU doesn't have to process makes more
cycles available to you for your chosen program.

True, but whether this results in a significant reduction in CPU load
is something you need to test for yourself.

My cable runs up to 14M bps, so far, and may go faster if they would
quit throttling it down to 7.75M bps.

Quote:

Regardless, it seems to me that motherboard chipsets have come a long
way since last time you (or I) looked. Having said that, your
motherboard may be bottlenecked by a 100M bps PHY.

See http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/35382/...d_linecard.pdf

NVIDIA Native Gigabit Ethernet - The industry’s fastest Gigabit
Ethernet performance eliminates network bottlenecks and improves
overall system efficiency and performance

What bottlenecks? My NIC, router, and cable modem all run at 100M bps.
10 would be a bottleneck and 1G bps would be total overkill for a home
setup. My daughter pulls her 802.11G at a consistent 54M bps wireless
speed so she is not having a problem.

Quote:

NVIDIA FirstPacket™ Technology - Assures your game data, VoIP
conversations, and large file transfers are delivered according to
your set preferences. Lowers your ping time for improved online gaming
NVIDIA DualNet® technology

Bzzt. I don't game. If I get a surplus of energy I just go out and run
or ride my bicycle for the exercise. I never got the gaming bug, just
the health nut bug.

Quote:

- Two Gigabit Ethernet MACs with TCP/IP acceleration
- Teaming: allows two connections to work together to provide up to
twice the Ethernet bandwidth for large data transfers from file
servers to other PCs. It also provides network redundancy through
fail-over capability

For a busy office connection maybe.

Quote:

TCP/IP Acceleration: - Delivers the highest system performance by
offloading CPU-intensive packet filtering tasks in hardware, providing
users with a fast networking environment

Checksum Offload - Improves networking efficiency by reducing CPU
utilization. Allows the processor to concentrate on other tasks

Jumbo Frame Support - Reduces the number of calls to the network
driver, thereby reducing CPU overhead and improves throughput

Windows Control Panel/Web-based Management - Provides easy access to
system set-up and configuration. Interface determined by software
version

IPv6 Support - Ability to future proof PC systems as standards evolve

- Franc Zabkar

Now I gotta go and do some reading to stay on the same page. I just
bought the best I could get by walking into a Fry's Electronics and
getting the best they had on the shelf.
If I can get some security and offloading before the CPU, that is just
fine with me. I don't expect the NIC to be a cure all, but I have the
router (WRT54G) set up to firewall the worst offenders from ever getting
past, plus a few other functions. The NIC does the rest, and I have all
kinds of anti-everything running and still only taking up about 550MB of
my 2GB memory. Smooth enough that my cable modem and Comcast are now the
weak links. The only (very marginal) slowdowns I have seen were when
recoding super compressed Divx files to burn on a DVD, or recoding MP3's
to somewhat less then 192 K bits for an old vinyl rip. Gets the up
loader byte points but wastes my hard drive space.
Sum; I want the CPU as free as possible.
Reading coming soon here.
Bill Baka

#12

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:32:04 GMT, Bill <bbaka (AT) comcast (DOT) net> put finger
to keyboard and composed:

Quote:

Franc Zabkar wrote:

Well, for $30 I can buy a DVD player with a PSU, case, VFD, DVD
loader, RAM, flash EEPROM, remote control, etc, etc. Within that
package is an MPEG4 capable decoder chip which probably has ten times
the processing power of a $10 NIC. So no, I wouldn't be surprised to
find that I could buy a Gigabit NIC for around $10.

I have an older 3C905 and it just appears to have a fancy ASIC on it.
Whether part of that is a processor is debatable. That card seems to
show up more often than not.

I found this photo:
http://www.nicmania.net/nic/img/3c905-tx/3c905-tx_c.jpg

The card appears to have 3 main chips.

magnetics transceiver Phys layer MAC layer Host

Bel <--> DP83223 <--> DP83840 <- MII -> Parallel <--> PCI bus

Quote:

Tasking
ASIC
Media Independent Interface -| |

Network Interface Controller (?) -|

AIUI, cheap $10 NICs incorporate all three functions in a single chip,
eg a Realtek RTL8139, so they would be no worse than the 3C905 (the
latter dates back to late 1997 or early 1998).

As for current motherboards, they appear to incorporate the MAC layer
into the southbridge while the other two functions are integrated into
a single PHY/transceiver chip, eg IC Plus IP101. The connection
between the two is via an MII.

AFAICT this is a typical setup:
http://www.sis.com/UD_Data/products/...46_diagram.jpg

BTW National Semiconductor's DP8390x MAC chips are referred to as
Network Interface Controllers, so they are not strictly CPUs, as you
have said.

Quote:

but
that the more expensive ones have an additional co-processor to
support non-standard features such as hardware based security. If
that's the case, then it seems to me that you are bagging a Volkswagen
for not being a Porsche.

My comment on cheap junk on the MBs holds.
AFAICT, a typical NIC that sells for about $10-15 has the exact same
hardware as what is on a motherboard (other than a boot ROM socket).

If it is $10-15 on a 10/100 NIC then it is probably less than $5 on
parts on a motherboard. How cheap they can go, I do not know.

I think these days it may be as simple as this:

mag <--> PHY/transceiver chip <-- MII --> southbridge (MAC layer)

Of course that is not to say that any functionality is missing. In
fact it could be that your motherboard's LAN hardware is superior to
your 3Com 3CR990. Unfortunately I can't find a good photo of the NIC,
so I am unable to research its chips. It seems to me, however, that
you are being somewhat unfair in your criticism of standard NICs.
After all, unlike winmodems which have had either their DSP or
controller chips replaced by software, a standard NIC retains a full
complement of hardware and is therefore able to completely satisfy the
requirements of the relevant 802.3 standard.

FWIW, your K8N motherboard comes with the following drivers:

WinXP ethernet NRM driver version 4.42
Win2K/XP ethernet Network Access Manager driver firewall version 4.48
Network management tools version 4.16

On a final note, about the only significant difference I can see
between a very old Novell ISA NIC and a modern Realtek RTL8139 chip is
that the former has two 8Kx8 SRAM chips whereas the latter "contains
two large (2Kbyte) independent receive and transmit FIFOs".

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

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Onboard Realtek NIC - No lights?

PC Hardware (Network) Network hardware & equipment for the PC (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.networking)

Re: Onboard Realtek NIC - No lights? - 04-11-2007 , 05:32 PM

Re: Onboard Realtek NIC - No lights? - 04-12-2007 , 01:46 AM