Ethernet network controller latency

[bakidota]

Does the ethernet controller matter at all for gaming?? I have realtek gigabit one which is really cheap. I see alot of motherboards that are advertised as gaming come with killer e2500 ethernet controller, also i know that the gold standard for gaming is considered to be the controller from intel. For example some mother boards have these 2 : 

• Killer™ E2500 Gaming Network + Intel^® Gigabit LAN

so i wonder will i have improvement in latency for online gaming if i get one of these two??

or maybe its all a gimmick??

Btw i play games like WoW, bf4, dota2

[Electronics Wizardy]

you wont notice a difference at all between tem

[Doramius]

Depends on what your internet speeds are.  If you're on a 50/50Mbps broadband, a regular 10Mbps NIC is going to work fine.  If you've got a more robust connection like fiber, then having a higher speed gigabit ethernet connection can be recommended.  Having a high end gigabit ethernet with a 50/50 connection is not going to fix latency if your game requires a higher bandwidth communication.  

[manikyath]

12 minutes ago, Doramius said:

a regular 10Mbps NIC

i havent seen those since 1995...

 

in essence, at this point in time all boards come with gigabit, with the vareous implementations being *slightly different* but not different enough to care.

[Doramius]

Typo, I meant 100Mbps.   Agreed, I haven't seen 10Mbps since I finished my BAS about 20 years ago.

[pbx2]

54 minutes ago, bakidota said:

Does the ethernet controller matter at all for gaming?? I have realtek gigabit one which is really cheap. I see alot of motherboards that are advertised as gaming come with killer e2500 ethernet controller, also i know that the gold standard for gaming is considered to be the controller from intel. For example some mother boards have these 2 : 

• Killer™ E2500 Gaming Network + Intel^® Gigabit LAN

so i wonder will i have improvement in latency for online gaming if i get one of these two??

or maybe its all a gimmick??

Btw i play games like WoW, bf4, dota2

You won't notice it for gaming, but there might be a small improvement, but its only really worth getting for network management applications should that small improvement exist, and even so its unlikely to be worth it.

[jj9987]

The main difference is manufacturer support.

Intel's NICs are known to work great on all platforms and driver issues are very rare (especially on Linux machines). Killer NICs have had issues with drivers (but these have gotten better), but their software has always been quite bad. Realtek is just meh.

For standard gaming, it does not make much difference. If we were talking about high-bandwidth applications (servers/routers etc), then Intel is pretty much the only way to go.

[Blake]

On 2/8/2017 at 3:57 AM, bakidota said:

Does the ethernet controller matter at all for gaming?? I have realtek gigabit one which is really cheap. I see alot of motherboards that are advertised as gaming come with killer e2500 ethernet controller, also i know that the gold standard for gaming is considered to be the controller from intel. For example some mother boards have these 2 : 

• Killer™ E2500 Gaming Network + Intel^® Gigabit LAN

so i wonder will i have improvement in latency for online gaming if i get one of these two??

or maybe its all a gimmick??

Btw i play games like WoW, bf4, dota2

there will be difference, just not enough to make any difference or for you to even notice. Typically the intel is wired directly to the PCI channels (and then the CPU). the killer will be wired to the chipset normally.

 

In reality, it doesn't matter, as the difference is latency will be measured in μ seconds, where the latency you are looking at is measured in milli seconds. (slight exaggeration but the point of this is correct). all other differences are feature sets and driver maturity. In this regard intel wins again, despite what some marketing exec wants you to believe. Would I pay extra for the killer nic? no, doesn't mean i wont use it if it is already on the board.