Net work card + CPU load

[Hans du Plooy <hansdp@sagacit.com>]

Hi everybody,

I have noticed that on my workstation (P-III 1ghz, 512mb, Intel chipset, 
100mbit 3com network), I can copy stuff over the network at about 8-9mb/s at 
the best of times.  When I do this, my CPU usage is quite high.

I notice the same thing on my home PC (2ghz Athlon, 384mb, Via chipset, SMC 
network card - tulip driver).   On both these machines the CPU load seems to 
be directly proportional to the transfer rate on the network interface.

I can only assume that his is because both these cards do a lot of the hard 
work in software, in the driver.  Can anyone confirm/deny/explain this?

Either ways, our office would be migrating to a gigabit network soon, and I'm 
tasked with finding good network cards.  Can anyone recommend a gigabit 
network chipset that fully implemented in hardware - i.e. the network card 
itself does all the heavy lifting.  I'm looking for someting that would 
affect the CPU usage as little as possible.

Thank you
-- 
Kind regards
Hans du Plooy
SagacIT
hansdp at sagacit dot com