Is there a benefit to using a discrete NIC

[Arel Sickler]

Something I've been thinking about for a long time yet surprising have been able to find very little information on the internet about it. The topic sums up the question, is there any benefit to using a discrete PCI-E network controller over the gigabit controller integrated onto my motherboard? Perhaps this would offload networking tasks from the CPU, or is there already a co-processor on the motherboard that does this? What about sound cards?

Specs-

Gigabyte Aorus GA-Z270X
I7-6700k (Skylake)
32GB G-skill TridentZ 4000Mhz, 8x4
2x Crucial MX300 1TB SSD, RAID 0
2x Sapphire Nitro R9 390 in Crossfire

 

[Chugalug_]

Nope, doesn't take that much CPU power, leave it as is.
You might want to consider selling those 390s soon and getting a better graphics card, a 1080Ti would be a better fit given the rest of your specs.

 

[USAFRet]

There are very few instances where you might need one:

1. The onboard NIC has died
2. You're building a standalone firewall box, and need a second one (1 upstream and 1 downstream)


Soundcards?
The onboard is fine for almost all use cases.
Maybe if you were an actual music producer and had actual high end output boxes (speakers/headphones).

 

[Chugalug_]

Ditto, unless you have high end high impedance headphones (in which case you'd get an external amp anyway) a sound card isn't that great of an investment.

 

[Arel Sickler]

That is surprising, I would think network traffic handling and audio compression might eat up enough of the CPU's clock cycles that it would be worth off-loading that work from the chip. Even if it isn't worth the money I wonder if there's a way for me to monitor input data on the registers to find out exactly where each clock cycle is being spent, to give a numerical value to offloading networking/compression.

And I'm no music producer, but after about 3 months of nothing I'm looking for my computer tinkering fix *scratches neck*

Also I actually do have a 1080ti, but I find that while my Nvidia card is better for gaming my ATI setup seems to be able to handle raw parallel processing loads more efficiently, which is effective when using a compiler. The 1080ti is in the wife's Rig atm.