Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 12:21:59 -0400 From: "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" <jeroen@vangelderen.org> To: "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@looksharp.net> Cc: Marcel Prisi <marcel-lists@virtua.ch>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What NIC to choose ? Message-ID: <3BE80E27.3080707@vangelderen.org> References: <20011106102212.B42904-100000@turtle.looksharp.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi Brandon, Brandon D. Valentine wrote: > I really like the Intel EtherExpress cards using the fxp driver and have > had great success with them. Then again, every single one I have OTOH > is builtin to the motherboard, so I've never bought one standalone. All > of the server hardware I buy has them builtin. As for cheap NICs to put > in desktop machines, I _really_ like my Accton EN1207D-TX NICs. They > use the rl driver and contain the MPX5038 chip. It's a RealTek > 8129/8139 workalike that in my experience is much more reliable than the > original RealTek chip. I see close to full wire speed on them. I also > have had very bad luck with tulip clones. Either get an honest-to-Bob > tulip card or stay the hell away from them. Yes, some people use them > with success, but I have seen tulip clones deployed in beowulf compute > nodes which died at a rate of one NIC per 50 machines per month. Since > that purchasing mistake (which occured before my arrival) only true > Intel eepros are allowed in compute nodes. It would be interesting to know which clone chipset was giving you trouble. It seems unfair to declare all clone chipsets to be unreliable unless you have had a bad experience with each one of them. (The converse it true also, that is why I indicated the exact make of the tulip clone that I have not had trouble with.) Then there is the issue of the quality of the clone card itself which -when improperly engineered- may cause failures that have nothing to do with the chipset, no? My experience with the Linksys LNE100TX 4.1 (ADMtek chipset) has been nothing but positive, despite the fact that it is a tulip clone. Which were the exact types of cards that you had fail? As for the Intel EtherExpress, my previous post was not so positive. I noted reproducible timing-related errors when they were depoyed in quality 2U riser cards. No other card (3Com, LinkSys) had this problem. Using the Intel PRO 10/100 cards without risers gave no problems but they still have a worse price/performance ratio for my particular setup. -J -- Jeroen C. van Gelderen -- jeroen@vangelderen.org An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. -- Gandhi To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3BE80E27.3080707>