Re: best NIC Speed
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 09:06:28AM +1100, Donovan Baarda wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-01-14 at 08:33, Jean-Francois Dive wrote:
> > i agree, but not specially for the hardware quality of the Pro/X intel card
> > serie, but for the quality of the driver which have been developed by intel
> > and give out very good perf. The core issue is the driver and not the hardware
> > in a lot of cases.
>
> This is a very important point. Crap hardware with good drivers is
> better than good hardware with crap drivers. The more widespread a piece
> of hardware is, the more people care/work on the drivers, the better the
> drivers are.
I think I agree, to a point ... some hardware is so crappy that it
can't be disguised by perfume from a great driver. For instance, the
realtek drivers must do an excessive amount of copying due to weird
alignment issues with the realtek chipset.
> The crappy Realtek hardware works reliably for me... but admittedly I
> haven't pushed it hard or cared about performance. I know at least one
> person who abandoned an intel NIC for a Realtek because they couldn't
> get the intel working (probably at the time it was a case of a new NIC
> with no drivers yet, but still an issue).
I have avoided Intel enet cards for 4+ years now because of driver
issues. OTOH, I also avoid realtek cards after I had a few fall over
while trying to keep up on a busy network ...
--
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
A young man wrote to Mozart and said:
Q: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any
suggestions as to how to get started?"
A: "A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with
some simple lieder and work your way up to a symphony."
Q: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old."
A: "But I never asked anybody how."
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