Onboard devices VS Plugins ?????

[mol3000]

I want to settle the age old question....... is it better to have onboard devices such as video cards and network cards or is it better to buy plugin in's for the agp port and pci slots..... i am hearing to different things which is better and want to finally know the TRUTH!!!!!

[redwudz]

I thought the age old question was, 'Why are we here?', but I guess yours is important too. If you are asking which is better, on board motherboard video, lan, audio or separate; Then that's easy, separate is better, on board is easier. Lots of people here reuse their plug in boards on newer computers. There are a lot of MB's that have everything on board, but they are almost always the more inexpensive MB's. Still, you can get a decent MB with 'everything' on it. The technology is improving all the time. It depends how particular you are about sound, video. I hope that's what you are asking, otherwise, never mind. 8)

[glockjs]

you just gotta figure that plug in's are dedicated to what they do

[Tool Man]

On-board is a god-send for things like USB2, 10/100, Ultra ATA/RAID and so on. Mainly because it's frees up PCI slots for other things, and is usually cheaper than buying add-in cards. But........for graphics and perhaps even audio, the best advice is forget about it. Unless you only want a basic system for office work/web browsing. Onboard graphics simply can't compare with a decent AGP graphics card.

[redwudz]

I guess it's fair to mention that quite a few 'all in one' MB's still have a AGP slot and at least one slot for a PCI audio card, although that kind of defeats the purpose of buying a 'all in one' MB. Even a lot of the higher end regular MB's have built in audio, lan, USB2.0, Firewire; At least mine does. I still have a seperate AGP video card, as most 'on boards' don't have the best video chips.

[mol3000]

how about on board modems and network cards??? do they pull of your motherboard resources much????

[redwudz]

On board modems and lans? I doubt if they suck up enough system resources to matter. Maybe on an older MB with limited memory, but not with any modern MB and a decent amount of memory (256MB minumum is advised for XP, by me anyway)

[sterno]

how about on board modems and network cards??? do they pull of your motherboard resources much????

A few good boards have on-board network interfaces that are pretty much the same as Intel or 3com cards. Those are good because Intel and 3com make good NICs. Most on-board network interfaces I've seen are garbage like the nForce built-in NIC or Realtek chips. Most of these $5-10 PCI cards you see all over the place these days use Realtek chips.

Most on-board modems are softmodems which are inherently crappy, but then most PCI modems are too so it's not like you're losing anything.