Recommendations for NICs?

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi--

On Jan 21, 2010, at 9:27 AM, John wrote:
> This used to be a hot topic long ago, but now seems to have become
> rather dormant.  Does that mean that all NICs are pretty much
> commodity with all the good features (unaligned scatter/gather,
> etc), or does it just mean that machine performance has grown to
> the point where we don't care anymore?  The hardware.html page
> tells me what may owrk, but not what may work WELL.  The on-board
> NIC uses the fxp driver.  Should I look for another card that uses
> the same driver?

Intel (fxp, em) and Broadcom (bce, bge) make fine NICs, and the older DEC/Intel 21x4x Tulip series (dc/de) was quite good as well.  The Marvel Yukon (msk) and nVidia MCP (nfe/nve) seem to be OK (although older nVidia hardware had bugs); the Realtek (re/rl) and VIA (vr/vge) are at the bottom of the heap, especially the older pre-gigabit hardware.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck