Question: Why ain't I getting gigabit speed?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

I want to thank all of the various people who offered help, advice,
and suggestings regarding this problem.  It's all really appreciated.

Since I first posted about this issue, I have diligently tried to
isolate/debug the problem.  I swapped the card into a totally
different system, also running FreeBSD, and found the exact same
symptoms.  I used other equipment to verify that both my cables
and my Linksys E2000 were not the source of the problem.  Lastly,
I brought up the card in the exact same system where I had originally
noted the problem, but under Windows rather than FreeBSD.

Anyway, after all this testing, I believe that I can now say
definitively that the problem is indeed bad hardware in/on the card.
The card exibits essentially the same symptoms under Windows as it
does under FreeBSD, i.e. running only at 100mbs, rather than the
1gbs that it should be capable of.

I confess that unless and until I had done all of the testing necessary
to fully confirm this, it really isn't a result that I would have
either anticipated or expected.  I mean really, 99% of everything that
makes a card like this do what it is supposed to do is in the chip
(in this case RTL8110S-32) and I would expect that Realtek wouldn't
let one of those out of their factory unless and until it had passed
all normal QA tests.  So I guess that somehow, some way, the folks
who manufactured this card somehow managed to mess up that last 1%,
i.e. the "value added" that they put into building a card around the
bare chip.  I would have thought that screwing that part up would
have actually been rather difficult, but apparently somebody did
manage to pull it off.

The only notable markings on the board are a white sticker on the back
with a bardcode, a serial number and what looks like a model number,
FG-R8110-A4-01-BC01.  Results from googling around for various permu-
tations of that seem to indicate that this board was originally manu-
factured by "Western PA SYBA", and indeed, it looks perfectly identical
to the one pictured here:

http://www.tbcart.com/product/18198352477/West+Blaster+PCI+Gigabit+Desktop+1000M+network+PCI+network+adapter

(The eBay vendor who sold it to me did not list the name of the manu-
facturer in the relevant eBay listing, which is why I am puzzling this
out after the fact.)

So anyway, just a word to the wise... These specific boards may perhaps
not be of the highest quality.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  While I appreciate all the friendly advice people here have given
me, i.e. to go with a card based around some non-Realtek chip, I have to
say that up until now I have always and consistantly had -zero- problems
with the many other Realtek-based 10/100 cards that I have owned and used.
This 10/100/1000 card is the first one I've ever had that has caused me
any problems.