Cheap and reliable discrete Ethernet card?

[Howard]

Preferably PCI, gigabit not needed

 

[Emulex]

anything intel chipset is solid on just about any platform. (pci anything).

 

[drebo]

Intel PRO/1000 cards are cheap and good.

 

[RebateMonger]

It depends on your definition of "cheap and reliable". The cheapest Intel NIC on Newegg is $25. It has a five-star rating and most people would agree that Intel NICs are good.

Newegg also has a $10 (shipped) Rosewill NIC that also has a five-star rating. I use both.

If all I needed was a NIC that "works", I'd probably buy the Rosewill NIC for myself and an Intel for a client's office. I wouldn't expect either one to cause me problems.

It really depends on what you are using the computer for and what your expectations are and how much money you have. I wouldn't put a $25 NIC in a PC that will be used to browse the Internet and get email and I wouldn't put a $5 NIC in my servers.

 

[Rifter]

I always use Intel. I would go with the pro/1000

 

[Emulex]

well they picked intel as the the default windows gigabit virtual nic to emulate on vmware - to me that says enough about the gold standard right there.

now if you are old school. the Dec 21140A chipset (tulip?) probably works in *nix and *indows but those are probably hard to find these days

 

[Nothinman]

well they picked intel as the the default windows gigabit virtual nic to emulate on vmware - to me that says enough about the gold standard right there.

now if you are old school. the Dec 21140A chipset (tulip?) probably works in *nix and *indows but those are probably hard to find these days

I'd say they probably picked it because of the drivers more than the hardware. Hell, they picked the AMD PCNet32 too but that doesn't mean I'm going to search eBay for one.

I agree about the old DE500/Tulip cards, we used to use them at my last job and I stole a handful of them for my home machines. They worked in just about everything right out of the box, even Windows had built-in drivers for them which is saying something.