[SOLVED] Replacing a PCIe FE Family Controller

jimr1354

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I have a Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller in my desktop. I want to upgrade it to a PCIe GBE Controller. Does it matter what brand I upgrade to? Should I stick with a Realtek or doesn't it matter. HP Lists a PCIe 10/100/1000 Base-T INTEL Gigabit NIC card, but it is not available through them.

My desktop is an HP 500B Microtower with an INTEL Core 2 duo E7500 @ 2.93 GHz/1066MHz. I also have 4GB of memory, PC3-8500. I am running Windows 10, 32 bit
The desktop has a Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller. I checked the driver and it can't be updated to 1000 gigabit.
The HP website says a 10/100/1000 Base-T INTEL Gigabit NIC card (490367-001) - Includes low profile bracket

Can I use another brand or should I stick with a Realtek?
 
Solution
I would go with a used HP branded Intel if you know it's not a fake as there are LOTS of fake Intel cards out there. The same card branded by Dell would also be a good used deal.

Also, if you have PCI slots, a PCI gigabit card will work just as well and may be much cheaper since PCI cards are not as high in demand. I like the hp NC7170 cards (313559-001) since they work for regular PCI, are actually dual ports, and are server cards so they have advanced offloading capabilities so your already taxed cpu isn't taxed heavily during gigabit transfers:
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00320216

I have about 30 of these cards working in everything from a Celeron 1.7Ghz socket 478 system all the way to...
System should work with any add-on network card, you don't need to go with a specific brand.

Question is why are you looking for a GB network card on such an old and slow system? Going to a GB connection from 100 MB in that computer would be pretty much the absolute last thing I would change outside of maybe adding in colored fans.
 

jimr1354

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Dec 23, 2013
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System should work with any add-on network card, you don't need to go with a specific brand.

Question is why are you looking for a GB network card on such an old and slow system? Going to a GB connection from 100 MB in that computer would be pretty much the absolute last thing I would change outside of maybe adding in colored fans.

Why would I want to add a colored fan? Or an upgraded graphics card. I don't use this computer for playing games.
 
Why would I want to add a colored fan? Or an upgraded graphics card. I don't use this computer for playing games.

I don't think you read my reply too carefully, I was not telling you to do any of those, I was saying that adding a colored fan may be the only thing more useless to do for that computer than upgrading the network card. I also did not say anything about a graphics card.

You did not answer the actual question about why you are trying to change the network card, there is pretty much nothing that would be a bottleneck on that system that a faster network card will fix.
 
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I would go with a used HP branded Intel if you know it's not a fake as there are LOTS of fake Intel cards out there. The same card branded by Dell would also be a good used deal.

Also, if you have PCI slots, a PCI gigabit card will work just as well and may be much cheaper since PCI cards are not as high in demand. I like the hp NC7170 cards (313559-001) since they work for regular PCI, are actually dual ports, and are server cards so they have advanced offloading capabilities so your already taxed cpu isn't taxed heavily during gigabit transfers:
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00320216

I have about 30 of these cards working in everything from a Celeron 1.7Ghz socket 478 system all the way to LGA775 systems like what you have. They excel at what they do, bringing much faster network capabilities to systems that otherwise would be limited to 100Mbps.

You might not see a difference on speed for Internet access, but I just ran a LAN test on an older IBM 6794-21U, which is a 1.8Ghz Pentium socket 478 with only pc100 speed memory to my nas and it was well over 200Mbps for write and 300Mbps for read, and my nas doesn't even max out gigabit so it might even go faster. And that's a big improvement over 100Mbps (2-3x) if you're doing any type of file transfers. And to give you some comparison for Internet speeds, this was my P4 630 just a few minutes ago on our 500/50 connection:
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/57739950

Both these tests were with the NC7170 installed in each system. There's a big step up when you move to gigabit, even if you don't get full gigabit. :)

Hope this helps!
 
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