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About LinkBacksTo be honest, they don't make much difference anyway AFAIK.
I got a cheap one from Ebuyer, and it works just fine. It even has Wake On LAN, but I haven't exactly used it..
To be honest, they don't make much difference anyway AFAIK.
I got a cheap one from Ebuyer, and it works just fine. It even has Wake On LAN, but I haven't exactly used it..
I have always found Allied Telesyn/Corega NICs to be very relaible. They are within the budget that you specified.
The cheaper allied telesyn cards that I've used are just Realtek 8139C's. So you might as well just get the ebuyer cards.
To be honest you don't need anything special for a home desktop. If you were running a highly loaded server it would be worth buying a more expensive card that supported things like checksum offloading, IRQ mitagation, and hardware crypto to keep CPU usage to a minimum.
At the bottom end of the scale there is very little difference.
Last edited by youngteam; 24-10-2003 at 03:12 PM.
The best NIC's are the Intel ones. The reason they are better than the £1.50 eBuyer ones is firstly down to overclockability. You will find the cheap ones don't scale well with increased PCI clock rates and will start currupting everything going through them, where as the decent NICs will just operate as normal.
The cheap eBuyer ones are WOL compatable and also come with the cable to connect it to the correct buffers on the motherboard too, which is not bad for the price.
Not sure of other enhancements that the more expensive NICs provide though...
NS
eBay for a 3com 905 or an Intel EtherExpres100. both are excelent (far better than an 8139), and tend to go for £5 max. and they're ususally sealed...
--jo
since people don't see the difference, an example. I encoded some high bitrate music videos from a DVD. a housemate tried playing them from a network share. as soon as a particular scene began, the framerate dipped to almost nothing for the duration. he changed to an INtel card instead of a Netgear, and the problem went away. a bit of closer checking just shows the cheaper card was choking on the heavy traffic in the scene. couldn't handle it. CPU useage was spiking, it was falling over. a card based on a decent chip (Intel or 3Com) uses a LOT less CPU, and hence results in a better experience for YOU.
Checked eBay for the Intel etherexpress cards and turned up nothing, I tried searching - "Intel EtherExpres100 "Intel EtherExpress100" "Intel Ether" "Intel Express". But no NICs turned up.
Now checking the 3Coms.
NS
well eBay seems broken at the moment (returns lots of matches but doesn't show them to you). easiest to do a blanket search for Intel or 3Com, then browse to Computing\Components\Networking
--jo
As mentioned, the best of the "budget" cards are probably the 3C905 or eePro100. They are both available new for ~£30. My point was at the £3-10 range most cards are exactly the same. Either Realtek 8139, SIS 900 or Davicom 9102.
So as I pointed out the better the card, the less CPU time used.
If you want to read about the various extra features cards can provide there is some good info at http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/ it's linux biased but a good explanation nonetheless
Last edited by youngteam; 24-10-2003 at 04:18 PM.
Yeah, I managed to find 2 Intel EtherExpress cards and only one of them was a Pro version, so there aren't many available on eBay.
3COM on the other hand, there were loads of them on eBay for £3 (listed as 3COM 900 cards).
NS
Bear in mind there are a few different types of 3c905. The 3c905B is probably the one to go for as it uses a later chipset than the 3c905 including power management support, wake on lan and checksum offloading. The 3c905c is a managed card which you probably won't need as a home user
its the same with the Scan.co.uk ones, £3.27 each, and they work perfectly! Makes you wonder how 3Com ever makes any money.
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
Picked up an Intel EtherExpress Pro/100 and it turns out that the original Pro/100 cards are infact from 1996 and are not supported by XP and only have beta drivers for Win2k.
Well, after that waste of money, lets try for a 3com 3C905C. Though are there any of those with the same name that are infact complete rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe? (Specifically the 3C905C-TX-M...).
NS
Last edited by Enverex; 20-11-2003 at 03:00 PM.
The 3C905C is the managed card, I've got a couple here in Win2k server machines so you shouldn't have a problem.
The 3C905C is the managed card, I've got a couple here in Win2k server machines so you shouldn't have a problem.
Which Intel Pro/100 did you get? The ISA one? I've never had a problem with the PCI drivers on any version of windows but the ISA ones are a different matter.
No, it's the PCI version.
http://support.intel.com/support/net...eisa/index.htm
NS
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