Network adapter advanced settings: Just curious if anyone here modifies their network adapter advanced properties... for example disabling Flow Control, or messing with your Speed & Duplex settings. I personally have left everything to it's defaults (don't mind screenshot, was messing around. Just showing a picture of what I mean)
On the nvidia NIC's I disabled all offloading + bandwidth/power saving functions and enabled flow control, since that worked better. With my current NIC I got offloading and flow control enabled, since those operations are done directly on the cards hardware (it has its own CPU and RAM). I got some of the network management in Windows disabled thou. I don't see the big effect when it comes to pure bandwidth, but pings are definitely a lot lower. That gives me the best performance for mmo gaming. Another thing to take note of is the Sidescaling option. If you got a 1000Mpbs NIC connected to a 100Mpbs interface you will have lower upload than with it disabled, that was something I saw with the NIC's sitting on my board. Nothing dangerous will happen playing around with the settings, just remember to do some tests in between so you know the effect for your system and use.
Interesting. Thanks for your reply. You mentioned lowering MMO Ping... have you tried: http://lifeandcode.net/2009/05/reduce-game-network-latency-in-windows-7-or-vista/ Works amazing. Went from 70+ ping in WoW to 30~
you don't need Flow Control unless you have 2 or more routers connected to each other in order to control the flow and prevent choking, if you're just using your router to surf the net, disable it, TCP will take care of congestion, flow control might get in the way and cause lost packets so its best disabled. autonegotiation is your best bet, but occasionally its good to set it to 100mb full duplex manually just in case. last but not least, if you see something called Interrupt Moderation, setting to enabled will lower cpu usage at the cost (but often not) of some speed loss or a small increase in latency, disabling it will use more cpu and your connection will be the fastest. i recommend leaving it to Enabled, this also helps when playing games where you need all your cpu. this is because interrupt moderation will delay a few requests and then send them all at once thus saving cpu, while disabling it will send 1 response for every packet which is more cpu intensive but faster because there's no waiting. c1:
Yeah, I normally have Flow Control disabled. Been using defaults ever since I recently updated my network adapters. I'm just pretty much curious as to what options most of you all choose.
<--------- for my gaming pc i use 1)Flow Control = Off 2) Interruption Moderation = ON 3) Speed/Duplex = manually set to 100 FullDuplex 4) WakeOnLan, Sleep, etc all set to OFF 5) also Power Management (allow computer to turn off this device to save power) = OFF and finally in W7 i disable Auto-Tuning. my 2nd pc got an nforce mobo, i disable everything including Interrupt Moderation unlike my intel Nic, nforce nics do not like any kind of offloading, flow control etc, often causing packet loss and other problems. so if you got an nforce, i recommend disabling everything, if its intel, leave your default. :banana:
