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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.

I have since been looking for alternative chipsets away from the realtek line. I have been eyeballin' the Intel PWLA8391GT using the Intel 82541PI chipset. I already have programmed the driver (based soaly off the datasheet) and found it to be a breeze as there were insane amounts of information in the datasheet (thank you Intel ).

Am I going after a good card? I really would not like to re-experience the netgear/realtek issues as my OS is designed for stability and performance and can not have these dud cards in the system.

So my question is, what cards (from experience or tech specs) are the best for stability and has gigabit capabilities through a copper RJ-45 jack (no fiber cards yet please). Please expain why in the post and vote for the card manufacturer of your choice.

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

I would have voted Bigfoot (though to be entirely truthful, their cards are over priced and really have more features then are necessary...), but in the absence of that I voted USrobotics, I have friends who have found them to work quite well...
The only ones I have are intel integrated ones (in laptops...) or a D-Link one in my desktop that has never really worked (Though it was probably the cheapest one in existence, got it for not much more than 20 euros in Paris... (In the fnac, where you already get bad value for money so...)).
Jules

i have used a few Intel chips that seem to work pretty well, their wifi can be a bit iffy, but the NIC's have never given me trouble

Killernic?

But no, seriously, don't buy that card.

I've always liked Realtek 8139 based cards, even though people tend to complain about them... nothing but praise for the 3Com 3c905C family as well.

Brynet-Inc wrote:Killernic?

But no, seriously, don't buy that card.

I've always liked Realtek 8139 based cards, even though people tend to complain about them... nothing but praise for the 3Com 3c905C family as well.

made by bigfoot, but it's over featured and pretty stupid, it runs a version of linux on a 400Mhz arm proc in the card...
So it diminishes network latencies loads by bypassing the standard TC/IP stack on windows and it unpacks the packages received and it runs a torrent on it, allowing you to rub torrents on it without affecting your PCs performance...
It's quite cool, but expensive and often useless...
Jules

The only NICs I have had trouble with were from VIA (which were repeatedly crashing my computer before windows even booted, so it couldn't be a driver issue).

I haven't done NIC programming yet (not anywhere near the top of my wish list) so I can't tell how friendly any of the others are.

As for the mentioned 3com, I still have a set (ISAs in a P1, and a 466MHz Celeron), and they show no signs of aging really. The problem is of course the ISA bit... It originally was the first NIC on the wish list until I got a box sharing a NIC with an emulator (intel pro/100)

Brendan wrote: 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...

I'm not 100% sure, but it seems more like the chip due to the fact that the 8169's re-claiming scheme is a chipset controlled process. Either way, its still an issue to me.

Brendan wrote: 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...

I never throw away cards unless they are beyond any future repair/use. Although the cards I have are faulty, they are not unusable. I will be performing future experiments on them... muahaha.

I got 4 whitegoods (RTL8139) ethernet cards and they seem to work OK.

01000101 wrote:I have since been looking for alternative chipsets away from the realtek line. I have been eyeballin' the Intel PWLA8391GT using the Intel 82541PI chipset. I already have programmed the driver (based soaly off the datasheet) and found it to be a breeze as there were insane amounts of information in the datasheet (thank you Intel ).

This has got me interested in doing a driver for DexOS for this card, have you a link to the datasheet, as i only get a 2 page general pdf, when i google.
Thanks 01000101