Benifitis of a dedicated NIC in a HTPC?

What do you mean dedicated NIC? You plug the CAT cable into the RJ45 port and it is dedicated to that computer I'm missing something here.

In any case, who are these people? I can't say as I've ever heard any talk (obviously) of a dedicated NIC.

-Suntan

Only talk I hear is going 1000 over 100 or 1000 over G and sometimes considering N for HD playback.

If your system has two ethernet ports, both gigabit, is there a reason to one or the other, or reason/way to use both at the same time?

I think you mean gigabit (1000) and the board might be gigabyte. They are both the same. You can bridge them but its not really going to do anything afaik.

If you have 2 gigabyte ports you can connect both to balance the network load. I believe that if you stream a movie to one HTPC it will only use one port but if you stream another movie to another HTPC it'll use the second port instead of the first one. You would only see a benefit if you're constantly streaming to many computers at the same time. Also unless you have a nice switch it'll be the bottleneck anyways.

I think the OP is saying "I've heard that buying and installing a 3rd party NIC card is better than using your motherboard's onboard NIC."

I do not know the answer to that question.

+1 That's how I interpreted it too.

OP: Here's one answer. Older motherboards used to have their onboard ethernet sharing bandwidth with the rest of the PCI bus. This could choke the data transfer rate, even if the rated speed was gigabit.
These days, most boards will have dedicated PCIe lanes for their onboard ethernet. If they still use the PCI bus for some reason, you may see a speed boost by buying a dedicated PCIe NIC if the motherboard also has PCIe slots.

onboard realtek NIC's are junk compared to Intel NIC's but in a home setting it really doesn't matter.

Honestly I've never used anything but the onboard NIC for the past 10 years. Any slight benefits you might get from a dedicated NIC you most likely won't see in a home environment.

external NIC's are for when you've got 100's of connections a second and need a TCP Offload Engine to reduce processor usage for you SQL server or IIS server.

Onboard gigabit nics provide >100MB/s throughput. The best hardrives only can push 60-70 MB/s and Blu-Ray only requires 7MB/s.

A single wired onboard gigabit nic is plenty of bandwidth for the most demanding home usage scenarios (even home server kinda stuff).

Agreed.

I just recently upgraded to gigabit and I have been serving HD TV, DVD and Blu ray around the house for some time. Good old 100mbit has more than enough bandwidth for media usage unless you are really running a lot of TVs.

-Suntan

I also use onboard NIC's (I would agree that the Intel ones seem to have less issues than realtek ones) I have a gigabit network with jumbo frames enabled and the only thing that really uses that capability is when I transfer BluRay ISO's to my server downstairs... it takes like 2 min for each one at ~107MB/s over the gigabit network ...but past that as previously mentioned all you need is 100Mb network for playback dedicated NICs wont buy you any additional performance.

As others have said, unless your onboard NIC is one of the older types which used to share with PCI, there's zero benefit for the HTPC. Now, do you need a dedicated one for your server or not, becomes a slightly more complex issue, but unless you're doing some heavy file I/O and/or have a ridiculous number of devices accessing the server, there's really no need on the server either.

Now, realtek onboard NICs certainly ARE inferior to Intel NICs (whether onboard or add-in), but I doubt any of that will matter in your typical home setting.

I don't know about that because if you do frequent transfers of data I find that Realtek's drivers or their hardware just plain sucks. Jumbo frames basically does not work. Just try 9K frames on an 8111d to another 8111d it craps out big time. I was thinking of outfitting the Home Server with an Intel card because this crap from Realtek is really bugging me.