Gigabit NIC's

[doan]

Newegg has gigabit NICS from $11.00 to over $100? Any gotchas on the cheap ones?

 

[yoda291]

avoid broadcom NICs like the plague. Some people have good luck with them, but I've experienced too much agony because they suck.
I used a NIC from a company called JustLink(?). had trouble holding vpn connections. Same thing with whatever chipset the nforce uses. Other than that, /shrug.

you can never really go wrong with intel pros. I've used literally about a hundred of those intels in servers and workstations and never had a problem. Then again, it's a NIC. Don't go crazy.

 

[azev]

Yup yup he's right. I've used many different brand of gig nic, but intel is by far the best gig nic card available.

 

[ethergnome]

For home, Netgear should be fine. For a server, or a NIC with "teaming" features, $100 is cheap.

 

[ColKurtz]

Originally posted by: yoda291
avoid broadcom NICs like the plague.

I'm not sure about the low-end consumer models, but about 1/4 of our servers have GBT Broadcom's, and we've had zero problems with them.

I guess when someone has a bad experience with something they tend to think "they all suck", but in our case we haven't had any problems at all.

Just my .02.

 

[ethergnome]

broadcom has a range of products like all major vendors. how their chips are implemented can also make a difference.

 

[Haden]

I have very good experience with syskonnect based adapters (mainly SMC).
We just bought several Intel NICs, but aren't happy - once several hours they choke for a few seconds (and are brought back by watchdog), anyway, it appears to be driver problem which is being worked on.

 

[yoda291]

Originally posted by: ColKurtz

Originally posted by: yoda291
avoid broadcom NICs like the plague.

I'm not sure about the low-end consumer models, but about 1/4 of our servers have GBT Broadcom's, and we've had zero problems with them.

I guess when someone has a bad experience with something they tend to think "they all suck", but in our case we haven't had any problems at all.

Just my .02.

Well, maybe I just had a bad experience.

I have 7 dell servers and 5 HP servers that came with dual gig broadcoms, and regardless of what software is running and after 5 motherboard replacements, the NICs lock up and do nothing after 5-6 days or so. Less under heavy load. We replaced them with dual intel pros and they work beautifully. IMO, it's worth the few dollars more to avoid using a broadcom.

Plus, if you hear your red hat support engineer go "aw shyt!" when you tell him you're using broadcom NICs, you start to wonder a little.