>
> 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.

rtk chips are not only bad because of that. it locks very often just
stopping packet transmission.

> > 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

isn't that expensive.

anyway - at least here there are very cheap cards available with AMDtek
chip compatible with tlp driver. works fine.