Intel is by far the best brand. And a network card (NIC) is something you should buy and forget about it. Intel cards are very well supported on Windows, Linux, OSX and BSD. If you need to buy a new NIC, seriously, get one from Intel.
Here in Paraguay, the only brand you can get easily is TP-Link. Any other brand you must import yourself. While decent enough for Windows use, it does show some less than stable behavior under BSD. Which I use for my router. Which was previously used (for 8 years) as a Windows PC. I mean to say that it is never certain what the PC you have will be used for over it's total functional life span. You are far better prepared for whatever you want to do with it, using an Intel NIC. TP-Link is the only brand you can get here easily.
TOR is the main cause of your slow surfing speeds. Generally speaking, your traffic is being diverted over several TOR nodes to mask its comings and goings. There are much less nodes available to TOR than for standard traffic. The most optimum route TOR traffic can take to your traffic is therefore much(!) less optimal than with a standard connection. Not only that, the type and connection speeds of TOR nodes that are available to you will vary a lot. The creation and re-assembling of your anonymized traffic will also put an extra load on your CPU too. Privacy/anonymity comes at a price.
From previ8ous post I understand you are dead set on using TOR, so in your case I would use add-blockers/script blockers when surfing. These prevent a lot of ads/scripts to be loaded and reduce the amount of traffic that has to pass through your TOR nodes. Less traffic also means your CPU has less work to do. This will affect the functionality of most of the sites you wish to visit and you will need to spend time honing those blockers to give you the best compromise between functionality and speed of the websites you visit.
If you can, use TOR only when you absolutely need it, that is the biggest speed increase you will ever get. Buying a new NIC for a TOR speed increase won't do you any good. Getting a much bigger plan for your internet connection will help much(!) more with TOR.
For example: say that you currently have a plan that gives you 2MBit/sec download speed and 1MBit/sec upload speed. If you would subscribe to a new internet plan that gives you 10MBit/sec download speed and 5MBit/sec download speed, your TOR setup has now 5 times the amount of bandwidth for the TOR traffic. This has serious impact. Your current NIC can handle 100MBit/sec speeds for up- and download. Even with the new plan almost 90% from the capacity from your current NIC isn't used. As said previously, privacy/anonymity comes at a price.
Consider buying
this new/faster NIC only if:
- you have a computer network at home and often transfer GigaByte sized files from one system to the other. In this case you must buy a switch that can handle those faster speeds as well. Else the NIC won't be able to use the extra speed anyway. And that is with the assumption that each of the computers in your network has a 1000MBit/sec NIC in it and you have used the correct (CAT5E or better) network cables (UTP).
- you want to make sure to have better network capabilities support with non-Windows operating systems.
For your current computer setup, your current NIC is more than adequate.
See the amount of hardware on Intel NIC and NICs from other brands? That extra hardware makes sure that the NIC itself doing all the work. All the others need Windows and the CPU in your computer to do the same job.
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