Aren't all 10/100 NIC PCI cards basically created equal?

[xenolith]

Why are some PCI NIC cards -- with almost the same specs like full duplex, IEEE 802.3, auto-detect, etc. -- $50 for some brands and $8 for others?

I'd like to start just a small home LAN. Won't those cheapo cards be sufficient? I just don't want to end up with junk riddled with compatibility and driver issues, while at the same time not pay too much for something that's overkill.

Thanks for any help.

 

[ProJecTX1]

Well the more expensive ones dont use as much CPU power, better for old comps. But now adays it wont really matter. I like Kingston ones Cheap and good

EDIT:
Waahoooo!! this was my 201 post! Senior Member I am

 

[DeepBlue]

I don't know about the 8 dollar ones but the 15 dollar ones have been working fine for me.

 

[blstriker]

To help you decide: Network Card Roundup It's not the last word, but my best attempt on the subject.

 

[Tsaico]

I personally like to go with the middle of the line guys... just average out the prices, and whoever is around that number is what I take. This is usually the Lynksis, netgears and SMC's. While most NICs will be the same, sometimes you will have to turn to things like driver support for your card, if you buy from a no name, then you run the chance of the shipping driver being the only driver to be released and never seeing support for it again... But then again, I hae a 3Com that hasn't had any revisions to it's drivers since t was released...

 

[FreeFrag]

Intel, 3Com or Cisco <---From a guy I know who works in a networking department.

 

[Workin']

Cheap's been working fine for me. Linksys, SMC, Netgear all have been fine. It used to be you couldn't go wrong buying 3Com, but IMO they have been slipping up lately with support, compatibility, etc. That's why I started using $15 cards - it hurts less when you have to abandon one of those instead of a $90 card.

 

[Russ]

It really depends on the application. I've built dozens of PCs with Realteks and they do just fine. But, when I build a server, or any other potentially high traffic, mission critical system, I use Intel or 3Com.

Russ, NCNE

 

[gaidin123]

I use mainly the 3Com 3C905-X TX 10/100 cards and cheapo &quot;Lanvision&quot; Realtek 8139 10/100 cards. I just found a really neat program called iperf that lets you benchmark network cards...I think it'd be great if anandtech or somewhere else did a comprehensive roundup of net cards using this and other benchmarking programs...

But basically, for me both the 3com and realtek cards have performed flawlessly for years in both normal and overclocked operation. That iperf program showed that my 3com could theoretically pump 90Mbps of traffic through it and the Realtek ones could do 70-85Mbps (70 in Win2k Pro and 85 in Linux). The 3com gets pretty warm for me but has never caused a problem whereas the realtek ones are tiny and cooler.

Also I like the realtek ones because they have drivers for basically every OS out there including all the Windows, Mac, *Nix, *BSD, BeOS, JavaOS, etc etc.

The better NICs might be able to offload a little bit of the network calculations onto the NIC (ie the new 3Com cards with hardware encryption/IPsec offloading) but honestly, if you snag a cheapo netcard you likely won't notice a difference between it and a name brand one. The realtek chipset seems like a good choice for a generic card simply because a ton of motherboard makers (including Asus) use that same chipset for the onboard LAN of many of their motherboards.

Gaidin

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

yup, cheapo will probably do unless you're looking for special features like onboard encryption etc. like some of the high end 3Coms have

-Ice

 

[Looney]

Drivers are an important factor too.

One big difference i've noticed is actually with dialpad. Using a Linksys NIC, i had spontaneous reboot of my computer when i closed the dialpad java window, or the dialpad java window wouldn't even open (now, how a nic would affect a java app, i have no idea, but this is a known issue).

And with my Netgear RA311 card and dialpad, i get laggy calls (i would say something, then it would take 3-4 secs before the other end hears it).

With my 3com card, everything is perfect.

 

[Russ]

<< I think it'd be great if anandtech or somewhere else did a comprehensive roundup of net cards >>



gaidin123,

Did you miss blstriker's post above? Brian did an excellent comparison of the popular cards.

Russ, NCNE

 

[gaidin123]

gaidin123,
Did you miss blstriker's post above? Brian did an excellent comparison of the popular cards.


Yes, I did read that review of the network cards a while back and I thought it was great.

The main thing that concerned me was the wide variance with the cards using the Realtek chipset. It'd be nice to know whether that's an OS dependant thing, a hardware thing, or a bit of both.

What I was envisioning when I mentioned that anandtech or some other site should do a comprehensive network card roundup, I was thinking of having them benchmark the cards several ways under several OSes and maybe even under multiple chipsets (or AMD/Intel motherboards) since NICs *should* be platform independant for the most part. Also I'm interested in how the new 3com cards perform since they supposedly offload some of the normal networking tasks to the NIC rather than leaving them up to the CPU (aside from the encryption/IPSec stuff).

I did like the review blstriker posted/wrote but it's really the only review out there that's very useful as far as I've seen. I think that more reviews and a more in depth comparision between an even larger number of cards would help out consumers immensely.

As a side note, I see people asking in the Networking and Overclocking forums which PCI NICs can handle overclocked PCI speeds. It'd be great as part of a review to isolate the NIC in a system and see how high a FSB it can safely handle...I'm sure that would generate quite a bit of sales for whichever NIC came out on top.

 

[Woodie]

not all NICs are created equal. We found that the Compaq 10/100 nics based on the TLan chipset (ThunderLan??) would not do 100 full-duplex. We've now thrown away all those cards, and replaced with 3com or Intel Management Pro cards.

--Woodie