On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 12:27:04PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 03:51:39PM +0100, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 03:56:57PM +0200, Christian Biere wrote:
> > > He claims certain models are, not RealTek in general.
> > 
> > The "evil cards" are the ones which are driven by rtk(4) like the one
> > mentioned here. In my opinion cards driven by re(4) aren't much better.
> > They are considerably slower than other Gigabit ethernet cards and
> > require more CPU power.
> 
> Why do you believe this to be the case?  The chips driven by re(4) have
> checksum and segmentation offload and a reasonably sane DMA descriptor
> format.  I don't see anything about their design that suggests that they
> should inherently be slower nor require more CPU power than other gigabit
> parts.

A comprehensive test of PCI Gigabit ethernet cards in a good computer
magazine. They've run various benchmarks (in a 32Bit/33MHz motherboard)
which suggested that the Intel cards are the fastest. The RealTek card
were the slowest causing the most CPU load (under Windows XP and Linux).
The magazine therefore recommented to buy either the Intel cards or
Marvell chipsets based cards depending on much money you want to spend.

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://zhadum.org.uk/