Tinker
September 15th, 2002, 09:38 AM
Here is old tip but one that works very well if you have the right NIC. I upgrade my NIC to a Linksys NC-100 and the reason for this is it will stand alone from the CPU. The cost of the card was $20 (USD) and the Linksys LNE 100TX was on sale for $5.
The advantage here is that the NC-100 will do bus mastering and run independent of the CPU. Bus mastering is a way for devices on the PCI bus to talk to other devices in you system without going through the CPU. This will free up your CPU to do other tasks and reduce latency from say the NIC to your video card.
Big Booger has been testing with me and he sees about a 10% increase on graphics from the net. I am seeing about a 30% increase using PCPitstop (http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/pitstop.asp) as my benchmark.
Here is the Reg tweak……
Some of the new Network cards ( I know one from 3COM has it) do provide capabilities of offloading some of the network protocol functionality like checksum from CPU. This is helpful since its free your CPU time and in a nutshell increases the CPU response time and overall speed by allowing CPU to do other jobs. It may not work on all cards of some of the cheap models but nothing wrong in giving it a try. To implement this tip, do as follows:
Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters] and look for the data key "DisableTaskOffload" and set its value to 0 to enable the task offload. By default if key is present, its set to 1 to disable the task off load. If this tweak does not have desired effect, you can change it back to 1.
For those who want to know more, Microsoft has an article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/network/hh/network/209offl_0wdj.asp) on it.
Source: XPTuneup
Give it a try and post you feedback please………
The advantage here is that the NC-100 will do bus mastering and run independent of the CPU. Bus mastering is a way for devices on the PCI bus to talk to other devices in you system without going through the CPU. This will free up your CPU to do other tasks and reduce latency from say the NIC to your video card.
Big Booger has been testing with me and he sees about a 10% increase on graphics from the net. I am seeing about a 30% increase using PCPitstop (http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/pitstop.asp) as my benchmark.
Here is the Reg tweak……
Some of the new Network cards ( I know one from 3COM has it) do provide capabilities of offloading some of the network protocol functionality like checksum from CPU. This is helpful since its free your CPU time and in a nutshell increases the CPU response time and overall speed by allowing CPU to do other jobs. It may not work on all cards of some of the cheap models but nothing wrong in giving it a try. To implement this tip, do as follows:
Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters] and look for the data key "DisableTaskOffload" and set its value to 0 to enable the task offload. By default if key is present, its set to 1 to disable the task off load. If this tweak does not have desired effect, you can change it back to 1.
For those who want to know more, Microsoft has an article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/network/hh/network/209offl_0wdj.asp) on it.
Source: XPTuneup
Give it a try and post you feedback please………