Ethernet port vs USB/Ethernet Adapter vs Other

Ethernet port vs USB/Ethernet Adapter vs Other

Some laptops have full ethernet port. Some have a specific dongle the company uses.

And there are those usb to ethernet adapters.

Are there differences in speed or reliability for any of these?

 

Full size Ethernet ports are usually hard wired into the motherboard itself in the laptop.
Ethernet adapters are usually hard wired into the board still, but the port is reconfigured to take up space, and then you have an adapter. The port this goes in usually won't work with anything else.
Others are run directly over the USB port, and isn't integrated at all, as it runs over the USB bus. It can be slower as it isn't "native" but probably doesn't matter outside of a few MB/s. Some USB adapters are better than others though.

As far as reliability goes, I've never had an ethernet point on my own machine die on me, but I have seen it on other computers. Then you'd get a USB-Ethernet adapter (though I like using PCIe cards for that if it's a desktop).

 

If both are nominally gigabit, the USB one will be bottlenecked by the USB (2 and 3) connection... assuming you can otherwise utilize all 1000Mb/s of the gigabit connection. On the other hand a gigabit USB adapter can actually be faster than an integrated 100Mb/s connection.

Despite that, you're probably hardly ever going to saturate even a 100Mb/s connection, and hence practically the only difference is going to be that one is integrated and one isn't.

 

Pretty much what everyone said. I'd bet that you'll have slightly higher latency on a USB to Ethernet adapter as well. Not that it'll likely be a problem.

 

usb 3.0 is 5gbit, as long as the chipset used does not suck, a usb 3.0 interface would have no problem achieving gbit ethernet speeds.

Today onboard ethernet should be optimal, I know my last laptops card reader was pretty shoddy and I went with an external usb 2.0 reader for faster speeds so onboard utilities being the best wasn't always the story.

 

I just wouldn't use the USB to gigabit ethernet adapter for online gaming, since the latency will likely be an issue. Otherwise, transfer speeds, as long as the controller is decent, should be close to the gigabit speeds as long as you plug into a USB 3.0 port.

 

I humored myself and used a cheapo wifi USB device and did some pings. I didn't get any noticeable difference, Any latency the usb might introduce is dwarfed by real world latency values and will be more then made up with game netcode.

 

A straight ping won't show much. But load up your system and see what happens. USB is low priority compared with the GPU and RAM and can result in some lag spikes, not to mention the overhead with converting the data. If you think a cheap USB adapter can compare with an onboard Intel or Killer NIC you'd be wrong. For file transfers, not a big deal.

It's like people that buy cheap desktop PCIe RAID controllers for $30 expecting top notch performance until they wonder what happened to their performance. The CPU is handling the management of the data in the RAID card and USB ethernet adapter, not a hardware controller.

 

htwing, I belive it is the overhead that is no big deal. The priority thing on system load might be a big deal, I guess that depends on the motherboard and how the onboard usb is handled. I mean going from BUS -> NIC and BUS -> USB -> NIC is again, just dealing with overhead of the USB. And it is not like game data is any large stream itself.