Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
Yeah. It's safe in the same way that a Pinto was safe in a rear end collision. Seriously, Realtek are the *cheapest* and *worst* possible chips. If you want anything approaching reliable, then don't get them. If you want something that will not hog your CPU under heavy load, then don't get a realtek. Really, 3COM is the way to go. Failing that, maybe Intel, though I am not as familiar with their newer hardware. -Roberto
I'll add my voice for this, the Realtek chips (at least the 100mbit ones) are rubbish. They don't perform well, they're incredibly sensitive to interference, and they have a habit of not lasting long.
That said, their 10mbit cards were pretty good, and I hear their gigabit ones are better than the 100mbit ones, although I still wouldn't buy it.
For cheapo cards, the SMC ones use an ADMtek chip, along with the tulip driver. These cards, despite their price, perform very well, and last pretty good too. I have a used close to a hundred of them in firewalls and mailservers, and I have yet to see one break (even had a firewall on an adsl line tha got hit by lightning - lots of nics behind the firewall died, but the ones in the firewall are still running today).
I have a Netgear PCMCIA card with this chipset too that really works well under enormous load.
For more expesive cards, the Intel cards are very good and very reliable. 3com cards are very good too, but I have seen one that wasn't fully supported but worked with the tulip driver (software mode, huge off-loading).
Hans