Nics and their relative value

[Ed Barnes]

Hi Kerry and list.
Thanks for sending this response to my and Alex's posts.
I was aware that the Realtech 8139 and its relatives weren't in the same 
league as members of the 3c90x family from 3Com, however; the editional 
points which you raised Kerry were for the most part things I wasn't 
aware of so this post is a keeper for me.
Luckally in my case my usage for the relatives of the Realtech 8139 are 
not mission-critical.
The nic which receives the greatest load here at my place is eth0 in 
this Red Hat box and it's a 3c905B.
That card has served me well for three years and it probably will for a 
bit yet.
Also just curious, I know that alot of 3com cards have life-time 
warranties, what's the general consensus regarding warranty on cheaper 
nics such as the ones we're discussion. Frankly I look at the issue lie 
this, you get what you pay for so if a Realtech 8139 dies after a year or 
two you got your money's worth, nevertheless I am curious here and was 
wondering if anyone on the list knew.
Ed

Ed Barnes
E-mail edbarnes at anomaly.2y.net or ebarnes1 at warp.nfld.net
Ph (home) 709-596-3165 or (cell) 709-683-6085
http://anomaly.2y.net
"Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his 
tail." --- unknown

 On Sun, 19 May 2002, Kerry Hoath 
wrote:

> 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.
> 
>