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TOE or TCP/IP Offload Engine adapters (sometimes called "network accelerators") will remove some of the workload from the CPU and OS and move it to the network card. A TOE card intercepts network packets and puts the payload from each packet directly to memory (and vice versa) without intervention from the host processor. This concept of offloading work from the main CPU is similar to a graphics coprocessor, which offloads visual rendering tasks from the main CPU onto the graphics card. They are more helpful to improve performance on slower systems but should give you some performance increase even on new systems.
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