On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 07:14:56PM +0100, Douwe Kiela wrote:

> The realtek chipset is known to be not the best chipset
> out there.

i agree. i got a realtek on my box and sadly it's
a chip directly soldered on the motherboard
(machine being a ss51g from shuttle). but even
if the card deeply sucks (because the kernel has
to spend expensive time in copying operations
because the card's dma is borked) you will still
get 12 mb/s from the card but this will have a
price: a higher cost on kernel side thus less
cpu time available for userland processes.

> I suggest you get a 3com or intel NIC, if you
> have the money. It's not like you shouldn't
> use it, it's just that there are better NIC's
> out there :D

Intel Etherexpress shows very low latency
so it's pretty nice for promiscuous mode
purposes and sniffing (which is a good thing (tm))

3Com does nice hardware too but keep with
good cards from them :)

something fun would be to buy a supported
multiple nick card: a pci card with 2 or 4
plugs to be able to do neat and cool things
with your network. i don't know if you ever
saw such cards but on sparc land they're
valued their weight in gold.

-- 
Gilbert Fernandes