[5] Early network interface controllers were commonly implemented on expansion cards that plugged into a computer bus.

The low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most newer computers have a network interface built into the motherboard, or is contained into a USB-connected dongle.

The low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most new computers have a network interface controller built into the motherboard.

A general trend in computer hardware is towards integrating the various components of systems on a chip, and this is also applied to network interface cards.

These define a standard receptacle for media-dependent transceivers, so users can easily adapt the network interface to their needs.

With multi-queue NICs, additional performance improvements can be achieved by distributing outgoing traffic among different transmit queues.

By assigning different transmit queues to different CPUs or CPU cores, internal operating system contentions can be avoided.

Some NICs offer integrated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for user-programmable processing of network traffic before it reaches the host computer, allowing for significantly reduced latencies in time-sensitive workloads.