Recommendation for 1000BASE-SX card?

[Danial Thom]

--- Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn at ant.uni-bremen.de>
wrote:

> Danial Thom wrote:
> >  The intel cards that use the EM driver are
> the
> > best performing cards in FreeBSD that we've
> > tested. We've test cards made by the same
> company
> > that use the broadcom controllers and the
> intel
> > cards are substantially better (ie use less
> CPU
> > passing the same amount of traffic). 
> > 
> > Be careful using on-board controllers.
> Usually
> > vendors, for some reason, don't wire them to
> the
> > pci-x bus. Most supermicro boards wire the em
> > controllers to the 32bit/33mhz bus and the
> tyan
> > and supermicro opteron boards we've tested
> wire
> > the broadcoms to a shared 1x PCI-E, both of
> which
> > will not only give you poor performance, but
> are
> > not capable of running full gigabit rates.
> > 
> > DT
> > 
> 
> The Intel card would be an INTEL Pro1000MF,
> right? This would be quite
> expensive (~ EUR 430), but good performance and
> stability would warrant
> that.
> ATM, we are using the onboard controller
> (Broadcom BCM5704C wired to the
> pci-x bus). I did not have opportunity to do
> performance measurements,
> but we do have problems with our Linkpro
> 1000SX/1000TX converters, the
> 3rd of which has already died.
> That's why i want to give a PCI-X card with
> fiber interface a try.

No, that would be the 1000MT, the MF is a fiber
card I believe. They are about US$120. in the US.

How do you know its wired to the PCI-X bus, since
I don't believe that the controller has a way of
reporting the way that the intel controller does?
What MB do you have?

Also keep in mind that the bge driver is a piece
of crap; driver quality is a much more telling
factor in these free OS's than the card in many
cases. The EM and FXP are the only drivers worth
anything (mainly because neither were written by
mass-driver mill man Bill Paul).

DT

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