Nics and their relative value

[Kerry Hoath]

You are perhapse using these cards in low usage conditions or do not use 
multicast.
The rtl8139 a/b/c  is a low cost connectivity solution for 100 megabit networks.
It is a cheap chip and for that reason has appeared on many oem designs and cards.
It has a 64-slot multicast filter that takes the intermediate result after crc and uses
that as a hash into a table. It works well enough
but does not filter anywhere as well as the tulip or 3com designs.
Although the 8139 chips are a pci-bus master, I have noticed negative
performance situations where mp3s broke up when copying large amounts over
a network under Windows.
Upgrading drivers helped aleviate the problem but did not fix it and system performance
was far better with the 3com 3c9x cards in them.

Older machines can have problems with the rtl parts, especially
if they do not support apm correctly. The 8139 chip goes to sleep and
crashes the box.
Replace the card with an rtl8029 or a tulip or a 3com which doesn't insist on
doing PCI pwer management and the problem goes away.

On your home network copying a few files around at 10 megabit or under low load
the cards might seem fine, but don't put them in a file server
or where performance is critical.
Cards that cost $10-$20US are not and never will be as higher performing as cards
that cost $50-$100.
Regarding the ne2000; now there was a completely cheap and
nasty chip design that was adopted by manifacturers because it
was associated with novell. National Semiconductors
took the simplest ethernet chip design and put out the 8390 chip.
It was cheap, it worked and it was clonable. It wasn't high performance,
it wasn't bug free and it wasn't the fastest card ont he block
either.
If you intend low use or only a few hundred megs across your network per day,
a realtek or ne2000 might suit you fine; but for the serious
network card purchaser, get n intel card or tulip-based
design.
Don't get me started on tranceiver failure. At $1 I expect you can tolerate some of these though;
just get lots of cards.
Never forget:
Good, fast, cheap; pick two.
On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 08:53:02AM -0400, Alex Snow wrote:
> I will be ordering a few of those cards, and if they don't work in my linux
> box like I think they will, I'll put them in my winblows machine.  I have
> used a d-link dfe538 card, with no problems till it got hit by lightning
> last summer.  I have also used some 3com cards like the 3c9 series, and a
> few etherlink 3s.  I have not seen much of a difference.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ed Barnes" <edbarnes at anomaly.2y.net>
> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2002 3:12 AM
> Subject: Re: nic at real cheap price
> 
> 
> > Hi folks, I have to join on this thread in defense of Rol.
> > Those Realtech's work with kernel 2.4 and they worked with 2.2 as well
> > according to documentation.
> > I say that they worked according to docs with 2.2 because my first work
> > with Linux was recently so it was 2.4.

-- 
Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au