What is the cheapest brand nic you recommend for a home lan?

[Spoooon]

I've heard some stories about how hard it can be installing and setting up a lan with off brand or cheap equipment. Are they true? If so, what is the cheapest brand I can get that comes with the fewest headaches?

 

[IsOs]

The realtek base 10/100 PCI nic is good and easy to set up yet cost only about $10.

 

[StickHead]

You can get a Linksys at Best Buy for $20.

 

[tim0thy]

I suggest anything that can do 100BaseT... it could be a cheap $5 card, as long as there are drivers written for your OS.

 

[Chatterjee]

Couple of things:

1. No matter how cheap a NIC you want, make sure its PCI.
2. Try to get a card that does not do most of its processing through the CPU. Realteks and NDC-branded NICs are guilty of that.

-S

 

[BCYL]

Netgear... good quality NIC but low price...

 

[bwgriff]

I just bought 2 Linksys 10/100 pci cards for $18.87 each (price includes shipping) from Onvia.com. I also bought a CNet 10/100 pci card for about $14 (including shipping) from Onvia. I use a Linksys 10/100 switch. So far, I have had not trouble with either card transferring files or playing games.

 

[Kanly]

A second vote for Negear.
Low cost but great quality.

 

[BDawg]

I use Netgear on my Win98 machine and my Unix server. Haven't had a problem yet!

 

[andri]

Whatever you do, STAY AWAY from NE2000 clones like Realtek.

 

[skriefal]

Most (all?) of the 100BT Realtek cards are not NE2000 clones -- that's only true of the 10BT cards.

 

[Zach]

I've used a coouple NE2000 clones without problem.

 

[fergiboy]

Hmn, you arn't going to save that much money going with a cheaper card. I picked up a Linksys card with WOL for 12 bucks. The netgear card is about the same price.

 

[Spoooon]

I ended up getting a pair of LinkSys 10BT cards and a hub for about 50 bucks. Not too bad. It's for my roommate's girlfriend's apartment. They don't really need anything good.

 

[teknoid]

Definately NetGear. I've used literally hundreds of them with no problems. Go to buy.com and search on FA310TX. The cards alone are around $18. They have a kit with 2 cards, 2 25' cables and a 10baseT 4 port hub for around $55. Hard to beat.

 

[Maximus1]

Yet another vote for Netgear...
I use them religiously and have never had a problem. Great price, and great performance.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Go for the Linksys 10/100 PCI NIC's. You can find them for $10 to $15 online, they are also LINUX compatible so if you ever want to go that route, you didn't shoot yourself in the foot when you bought the NIC.

 

[GT1999]

I've gone through the following network cards which FAILED to operate:

(2) Netgear 10/100 w/ WOL NICs
(1) Linksys 10/100 w/o WOL

3Com & Intel has yet to fail on me. I went with Netgear since I heard they were good quality, but the boards I have bought refused to function - the drivers were displayed correctly but the device failed to boot up. They sure do look nice though - they have a nice etching/sticker on the back of the PCB; unfortunately I don't care about the looks, I do care about how the NIC performs and if it works. I tried the NICs on multiple PCs with different configurations. I'm sure Netgear cards are decent, but it seems the ones I purchased were faulty. Just had to put that in bold & italics to shew away the flamers.

I recommend you purchase 3Com/Intel NICs here off the forums, they go for ~$20 shipped if the seller is decent.

Just my two cents.

 

[Spoooon]

Well, since it's my roommate's girlfriend that's getting the nics, it's not my problem installing them, Fortunately, that will fall to my roommate to due.

 

[Unclemo]

Dlink DFE-530tx are garbage... I have about 5 of them around and they go bad all the time for me.. have reload drivers... and 2 have just plain out died.

 

[Chatterjee]

The D-Links went bad? I have one in my ICS box and it hasn't failed on me (yet). How do you tell if they die on you?

-S

 

[GT1999]

<< How do you tell if they die on you? >>



When you can't ping anything on your LAN and/or send files to other computers.

 

[mixxer]

The most widely supported and BEST NIC on the market is the 3com 3C905xx. End of story.
We've used those at work for years and have not had a single problem. This is on 300-500 machines.

 

[kingink]

smc is the way to go for me.
kingink

 

[urbantechie]

I use Intel only. But for cheap go for those SOHO cards. D-Links are good too.