Re: Best Nics.

[Edward Murrell <edward@murrell.co.nz>]

On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 01:56, David Palmer. wrote:
> But as all of this is going to applied later in a commercial
> environment, I was wondering if anybody would be able to advise as to a
> decent make of commercial standard Nics.

First off, avoid anything with a realtek chipset. That should avoid 90%
of problems.

Depending on the price performance ratio, I've found CNet PRO 200s to be
good at the cheap end (Davicom chipset - dmfe driver). I have three of
these in one of my routers, which has been running nonstop for a good
three years now. They handle medium amounts of traffic fairly well, but
I wouldn't use them in my main server, where high CPU usage could impact
their performance.

If you need good 100mbps performance under load, you can't go wrong with
Intel. The 3Com 3c905Bs I use in my workstations also seem to take
anything I can throw at them (including trying to run Q3A X11/OpenGL
over a network, just to see if I could ;).

DEC Tulips (if you can find them) in my experiance are picky. When they
work, they work brilliantly, but I've always had major issues with full
duplex settings, and getting them to not kill the interface when the
cable is unplugged (which also does fun things like stop the DHCP
server).

Edward