Good NIC Comparison - Surprising results

po0k

http://www.dslwebserver.com/nictest.html

Gerry

Its a decent enough comparison, however I find the nic articles over at www.tomshardware.com a little more comprehensive. His conclusions about realtek I would say are reasonably accurate. Those cards have caused me more trouble than any other component. Sometimes they work perfectly straight away, other times they stutter like crazy, other times they won't work at all. A realtek nic and a via motherboard is quite the lethal combination. The amount of time wasted at lans trying to get them working together is unbelieveable. A good rule of thumb I find, is that that on a 100mbit lan, the activity light should be on almost continuously when sending or recieving files. If it isn't, you are getting perhaps 2 - 4 megabytes a second. This can be backed up by looking in performance meter.

po0k

Yeah, I know t might not be a perfect benchmark, but he at least tried to give a fair overview.

I'm interested in NICs (and switched hub) performance - and reliability/robustness -at the moment, particularly cost:performance.
Thinking of getting some Linksys stuff, but I've heard people give out about them and praise them in the same breath so I'm a little confused.
Not looking for anything that'll be managed....yet, mainly for filetransfer between a few PCs, gaming and hooking up the GalwayWAN to it.

Kairo

Originally posted by Gerry
...A realtek nic and a via motherboard is quite the lethal combination....

Whoop dee doo! Guess what combo of motherboard and NIC I'm using? :rolleyes:

I need a drink...

po0k

I've got 2x 8029ASs and a 8139.
They're not the most reliable cards, but they work (most of the time) and were very cheap. I'm looking to move upmarket now though.
Reccomendations? 2-3 NICs and a 4/5/8port 100MBit switch?

JustHalf

Originally posted by Gerry
A realtek nic and a via motherboard is quite the lethal combination.

YES