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Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 14:07:44 +0200
From: Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn@ant.uni-bremen.de>
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Subject: Re: Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card?
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Danial Thom wrote:
>  The intel cards that use the EM driver are the
> best performing cards in FreeBSD that we've
> tested. We've test cards made by the same company
> that use the broadcom controllers and the intel
> cards are substantially better (ie use less CPU
> passing the same amount of traffic). 
> 
> Be careful using on-board controllers. Usually
> vendors, for some reason, don't wire them to the
> pci-x bus. Most supermicro boards wire the em
> controllers to the 32bit/33mhz bus and the tyan
> and supermicro opteron boards we've tested wire
> the broadcoms to a shared 1x PCI-E, both of which
> will not only give you poor performance, but are
> not capable of running full gigabit rates.
> 
> DT
> 

The Intel card would be an INTEL Pro1000MF, right? This would be quite
expensive (~ EUR 430), but good performance and stability would warrant
that.
ATM, we are using the onboard controller (Broadcom BCM5704C wired to the
pci-x bus). I did not have opportunity to do performance measurements,
but we do have problems with our Linkpro 1000SX/1000TX converters, the
3rd of which has already died.
That's why i want to give a PCI-X card with fiber interface a try.

The 3com 996-SX is somewhat cheaper, does anyone have experience with
that one?

Thanks for all your replies :-)

	Heinrich