Question Internet intermittently drops out (signal between modem and router) - modem says there is internet signal - replaced some hardware There's a big step up when you move to gigabit, even if you don't get full gigabit. And to give you some comparison for Internet speeds, this was my P4 630 just a few minutes ago on our 500/50 connection:īoth these tests were with the NC7170 installed in each system. And that's a big improvement over 100Mbps (2-3x) if you're doing any type of file transfers. 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. They excel at what they do, bringing much faster network capabilities to systems that otherwise would be limited to 100Mbps. 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. 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: The same card branded by Dell would also be a good used deal.Īlso, 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 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.

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