Is a hot NIC normal?

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

I've been having lockups lately; definitely hardware (even Knoppix 
locked up). At first I thought I had cooked my CPU (AMD). Then after 
swapping it out, I decided it was the mobo. Then I found a jumper on the 
mobo for 100/133MHz, and I moved it from 133 to 100 and the machine got 
stable again (for the hour or so I tinkered with it), but the network 
wouldn't work.

Tonight I started tinkering again and finally decided to reseat the NIC, 
and in doing so also decided to move it one slot over. When I powered 
up, the machine came to life, as did the network.  "Yea!", I thought.

But not long thereafter, the machine froze again. So I decided I was 
going to have to buy a new mobo after all. Then just before giving up 
for the night, I got to wondering if network traffic was somehow causing 
the freeze-up, so I decided to disconnect the ethernet cable, and as 
long as I still had the case open, I decided to pull the NIC just to 
eliminate that as a hardware problem. When I laid my hand on the NIC, I 
was surprised that it was quite hot. Not so hot you couldn't hold your 
palm to it, but anything more sensitive than a palm might have been too 
uncomfortable.

So I'm definitely going to try replacing the NIC when I can scrounge one 
up, but in the meantime, I'd like to ask, "Is such a hot temperature 
normal for a NIC?"

Thanks!

--
Kent