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$10 NIC vs. $100 NIC

C

CTho9305

Elite Member
Why exactly would I want to buy the $100 one? The realtek 8139 works great under many OS'es and does everything I need. The $15 versions even have boot rom sockets 😉. Whats so great about the $100 3Com NICs?
 
I read somewhere that 3COM's NIC will process its instructions on their chip. Personally I don't think its worth it for personal use. Maybe if you are running a webserver with hundred of thousands or millions of hits per month and take up a lot of processing, then you should consider investing in 3COM.

I owned one of their SOHO cards and they were not very good in releasing drivers.... At that time it was windows 2000.

 
I also think it's the same old "winmodem" vs. "hardware modem" story...
With current processing power, I see very little issues with using a $10 NIC.
For a server, I would get the more expensive one, just in case.

Edit: bold
 
Well, at work we have EISA 3com nics running in around 100 server now for, oh, about 7 years straight and we NEVER EVER had a bad nic. When I first set up these server I bought about 10 spare nics of these type and they are still on my shelf, never used.
 
Intel and 3Com typically have slightly less CPU utilization than some of the cheaper ones. Their basic cards on the same consumer level cards typically run around $30 nowadays. The margin is usually so small it makes little difference. A lot of companies just choose to go with a brand name. I personally use the Netgear and Linksys NICs because I see little to no performance difference. Around $60 - $70 you see firmware that allows bonding of cards to up available bandwidth. In conjuction with stuff like Cisco Fast Etherchannel you can bond up to 8 NICs for 800mbps of bandwidth. The $100 you talk about usually refers to ones with built in 56bit or more IPSec encryption used for secure data transfers. That is a feature you won't see in lower priced cards.

Windogg
 
Yeah I picked up three IBM Netfinity Security Adapters that have the processor on them. $10 each at a computer fair. Guy was selling them with a bunch of other "modems". 🙂

Cheers!
 


<< Whats so great about the $100 3Com NICs? >>


Nothing. Its old school high pricing for the corporate customer. In fact, the only nic that ever died on me was a 3Com.
 
If you can find the older Netgear FA310TX NICS, they are awesome NIC with low CPU usage and had drivers for just about any OS. Its based on the DEC 'Tulip' chipset ( it may say Broadcomm, its a two-chip design and the chip itself is big). I found a few over at my local Circuit City (of all places) for $10 after rebate a few months ago. Normally, they are $20.
 
Yep, I'm running Netgear FA310TX's on all my machines right now. The only real difference with the pricier 3Com cards is that they process a lot of the networking instructions on it's own chip, independent from the CPU. This results in lower CPU utilization in comparison to lower priced cards. But considering the processing power (and memory management) that exists now, networking instructions hold almost 0 weight in the midst of programs like Photoshop, Lightwave, etc.

Any nic will do, really. I personally recommend (from experience) nics from DLink, Netgear, Linksys, SMC. Netgear is still my favourite amongst these, for their other networking hardware like switches, routers as well as nics.
 
some NICs really do perform (better throughput) quite a bit better than others...of course, if all u're using it for is cable modem, then any NIC will perform the same
likewise, some NICs have lower CPU overhead than others....again, I don't see this as a major benefit/pitfall.

i read a review of various models, and a lot of the realtek NICs TOTALLY stunk in the bandwidth benchmarks...poor throughput scores....but i think it depended quite a bit on the manufacturer of the card....i can't recall for sure.

I do remember that the best/bang buck card was the NDC SOHO one...performed near the top and was the cheapest card reviewed...somebody has to have that review i'm thinking of...in fact, i linked to it off this forum.

all-in-all, get one of the semi-big name brands...linksys, etc. (and NDC of course)
 


<< If you can find the older Netgear FA310TX NICS, they are awesome NIC with low CPU usage and had drivers for just about any OS. >>



Yup, that's what I have in my older system and it runs like a dream. Curiously, my newer one has the FA311TX and I've had some problems with talking to my router.
 


<< Intel and 3Com typically have slightly less CPU utilization than some of the cheaper ones. Their basic cards on the same consumer level cards typically run around $30 nowadays. The margin is usually so small it makes little difference. A lot of companies just choose to go with a brand name. I personally use the Netgear and Linksys NICs because I see little to no performance difference. Around $60 - $70 you see firmware that allows bonding of cards to up available bandwidth. In conjuction with stuff like Cisco Fast Etherchannel you can bond up to 8 NICs for 800mbps of bandwidth. The $100 you talk about usually refers to ones with built in 56bit or more IPSec encryption used for secure data transfers. That is a feature you won't see in lower priced cards.

Windogg >>

Pay attention, the man knows his NICs.



<< If you can find the older Netgear FA310TX NICS, they are awesome NIC with low CPU usage and had drivers for just about any OS. Its based on the DEC 'Tulip' chipset ( it may say Broadcomm, its a two-chip design and the chip itself is big). I found a few over at my local Circuit City (of all places) for $10 after rebate a few months ago. Normally, they are $20. >>

Odd...my Linksys LNE100TX also has the 'Tulip' chipset. Or at least Linux uses a Tulip driver for it. I always thought that the 'Tulip' was just a generic lowest common denominator driver, and that having manufacturer specific drivers was preferable.
 
For the home user, there should be no need to go above an $25 intel nic.

The reasons I chose the intel.

hardware ipsec encryption
I'm guaranteed drivers for every os that arrives for the next 5-10 years.
name/performance.


 
Only thing about the Netgear FA310TX (mine anyways) is it would not work on a high PCI bus speed. Mine would go to 38 MHz PCI, no higher. Now I have a Linksys that will work up in the 40+ MHz PCI range.
 
Some like my Duo64 Adaptec have multiple ports, fault tolerance, Duralan technology allowing consolidated slot usage, Fail over, Port Aggregation and server management software. This dual port controller can handle up to 400 Mbps throughput with full duplex support and is a 64bit controller backwards compatible to 32bit. Not something you would commonly need at home but I got it cheap on the forsale forum so why not? 🙂
 
I've got a Cheap D-Link DFE530TX+ in my desktop and I'm extremely happy with it. The rest of the house uses netgear. My laptop has a Actiontech NIC/56k modem mini-PCI card combo in it (I don't use the 56k modem though). If I had the money, I'd update it to a 3com though...
 
Just a quick question here.

I currently have a D-Link DFE-538TX in my system. I do have a refurbed NetGear FA311 (came free with my NetGear RT314 Router), would it be beneficial to swap these two cards around?

Thanks,
-Erik
 
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