[Pc_Support] Cheap PCI GbE NIC that has fair specs for $15 ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

I know a lot of you are buying mainboards with GbE on-board.  But
just in case you need to add a GbE PCI card (when you don't have
PCIe) to your system, but don't want to spend a lot of money, the
RTL8169 MAC isn't a bad solution.

Now it doesn't do jumbo frames last time I checked, but if you're not
spending money, then you're probably not too worried about that.  It
does have 802.3x flow control (make sure your switch does too!) which
is pretty much essential at GbE (especially with only 1500 byte
frames).  It also has a 64KiB SRAM receive buffer, which allows the
card to queue up a good 47 1500 byte frames before becoming full. 
Lastly, the 32-bit card is 3.3V with 5V tolerances (universal), and
can run at 66MHz (which is nice in case you want to put it in a PCI-X
slot).

Ignore the specs on TCP off-load support, that's just transmission
only -- let alone the transmit buffer is only 8KiB (so forget jumbo
frames).  But for $15, I'm not complaining.

An example card is this $15.99 at NewEgg.COM, the NW-500-GB:  
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833332506

I know the Linux 2.6 kernel has RTL8169 support for sure, and I'd
assume more recently 2.4 kernels have the driver as well.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith     Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org      http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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*** Speed doesn't kill, difference in speed does ***