Hi,
I bought a box of "dodgy" old 10 MHz ethernet cards a while ago - about 14 cards from various manufacturers (mostly PCI but a few ISA too). Almost all of them actually worked (even though they were in a box marked "dodgy" at a local computer repair shop when I bought them - $10 (aust) for the entire box!).
Since then I got two PCI Netgear cards (I think they're FA311 - Gentoo's LSPCI shows one of them as "National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller"). Both of these cards have been entirely reliable.
I also got a nice Intel card a few months ago - Windows calls it a "Intel(R) PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adaptor" (because it adapts my desktop???). Never had a problem with it either.
If I wanted to buy more network cards I'd probably buy more of the Intel PRO/1000 GT cards - partly because Intel's documentation is almost always extremely good (I haven't actually looked for the documentation for it yet though), and partly because the card's ROM supports netboot/PXE out of the box (which is why I bought it to begin with).
01000101 wrote:Ok, I am extremely annoyed at my last 2 purchases of NICs. I bought two new Netgear FA311 (RTL8139) and Netgear GA311 (RTL8169s-32) cards to make sure I didn't do any damage to my older used cards that I had done some... experiments on and I didn't want to keep using them for development as I was unsure of their stability anymore.
Out of those 4 cards, 1 rtl8139 and 1 rtl8169 chipset were purchased damaged. I quickly found out that the rtl8139 chip had a permenant RxErr interrupt status set and had unending dropped packets (I did further test through windows to confirm) and the rtl8169 had the previously (other post) mentioned descriptor release issue where the chip does not re-claim descriptors automatically and it also had a permenant Tx Descriptor not Found interrupt status.
2/4 were bad.
Are you sure it's the chipsets?
The handling procedures at some computer shops can be relatively dodgy sometimes (e.g. untrained noobs who don't understand about
electrostatic discharge), and at some shops if you return something saying it's faulty they sometimes just put it back on the shelf for someone else to buy...
Note: If you've got any dodgy/faulty hardware, don't throw it away! Keep it and see if your device drivers will notice that the hardware is faulty. Imagine a large network where an ethernet card becomes faulty in a server or something - it'd be nice if the OS let the network administrators know which card is having problems...
Cheers,
Brendan