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What is the best 32bit PCI 10/100 Card?

B

Blundar

Golden Member
A question in a reply to a post of mine in the hot deals forum actually prompted this?
What is the best 10/100 card to use, constrained by a 32 bit PCI bus?

IMHO four big factors affect the quality of a NIC.

1. Drivers - poor drivers cripple quality hardware.
2. Transfer performance - how fast can the card carry data? Theoretical max 100Mbs rarely is achieved.
3. CPU Utilisation - Does the card tie up the proccesor much during transfers?
4. Failure rate - do the cards break a lot?

Obviously drivers are very OS dependent.
The Samsung SC1200 card that you can find on pricewatch for $5 does not have Win2K drivers PERIOD, but it has awesome drivers under linux (DEC21140AF Tulip baby!!!)

Speaking purely of the hardware, which design is best? I heard "tulip, tulip, tulip" when I went looking 3 years ago, but things may have changed.

I have heard lots of very positive things about tulip designs, particularly the 21143 chip.

I have heard lots of positive things about the Intel EEPro100+ Management cards, with the exception of the hardware multicast filter being somewhat broken.

I have heard lots of positive things about the Adaptec Cards.

I have heard lots of mixed opinions of Realtek 8139/8139a designs.... Some say fast and reliable, some say slow and unrealiable.

What is the best single port card for Linux? Freebsd? Win2K?
What is the best multi-port card? DLink has a 4 port tulip design, Adaptec has some, Intel has some, ...

Any/all benchmarks and expertise welcome here.
 
Wrong forum. Try Networking or General Hardware.

This is not a "Highly technical" question.
 
thanks for the review. You really should have done small file tests, too. Most net traffic would resemeble multiple 1-5k files, not one huge one. The performance curve for a different access pattern is often very different.

On the topic of appropriateness for this forum - I was looking for a little bit more in depth analysis of chip architecture - buffer size and tpe, queue length ... The type of analysis I was looking to find I feel is more a highly technical analysis than a networking/general thing.
 
LinkSys LNE100 EtherFast.

I bought several of these NICs at a local Fry's Electronics store for 9.99 a pop. Yes, that's less than 10 bucks each! Brand new, regular price.

I noticed a HUGE difference between these and the crappy D-Links (RealTek-based) that I was using before. I have no benchmarks to go on but both my wife and I have noticed a remarkable improvement in file transfers between systems (file sharing over NetBEUI) and internet connections (TCP/IP). No glitches of any type between them and my Netgear DSL/Cable security router/Motorola cable modem. No problem with installation under Win98SE.

This is the BEST NIC for home use that money can buy. It's every bit as good as the 3Coms and the Intels (for plain and simple home use; for heavy duty server functions, I don't know but I don't care). The only unknown about this board is the MTBF factor but for 10 bucks I could care less!
 
Having threads moved from one forum to another is going to get confusing. 🙂

If you're interested in benchmarking various network cards, try doing a file copy test like blstriker did in his NIC roundup, or you can use some sort of benchmarking program like iperf which runs on both Windows an Unix/Linux.

For me, I have 3com and generic Realtek based NICs, both of which seem to offer comparable and very fast performance. When pushed with iperf, it reported up to 90Mb/s with the 3com cards, and either 75Mb/s for the Realteks in Win2k or about 85Mb/s in Linux (same NIC). In real-world file transfer tests I usually get somewhere around 6-9MB/s.

Many people here will recommend the Linksys NICs, or 3com or Intel NICs for a somewhat pricier, but very good alternative to the cheaper NICs out there. If you want a guaranteed good card I'd get one of those since the Realtek ones are hit and miss. Luckily a local computer store for me seems to sell one of the "hit" Realtek 10/100 NICs which is what I've been using for the past few years.

Gaidin
 
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