Onboard IRQ Conflicts

Question

I'm about to get an AMD 64 system and I had my eyes set on the MSI K8T Neo 2 until I read the review on http://www.hardocp.com .  
The review states that when using the onboard gigabit lan there is a considerable performance lag.  I was wondering if any of you have noticed this and is it a real problem?
Also, are there any conflicts with any of the onboard features and the pci/agp slots?
Thanks

Answer 1

I did look at the review.  Here is what it said about the lan lag:
Network Utilization Tests
Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the onboard Realtek Gigabit NIC. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows TaskMan to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, a 750MB archive file containing various sized .WMA audio files for the large file transfer test and 750MB worth of various sized .WMA audio files for the small files transfer test were used in conjunction with an Intel Gigabit NIC on the host system, and a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.
The Realtek NIC performed well as far as average transfer rate for a Gigabit based Ethernet solution. The average upload was much faster, beating the download speed by 10 MB/s. However, this increased speed comes at an unacceptable cost of an almost 50% CPU utilization, with spikes as high as 60%. The CPU utilization during download was not much better, averaging between 30-40%.
The large file transfer test results identically mimicked those of the small file transfer tests. We again see the unacceptably high CPU utilization for both download and upload as well. MSI’s choice of the Realtek chip seems to be less than optimal due to the high system performance cost incurred while transferring files.