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

[Jason Boxman]

On Thursday 02 February 2006 09:20, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> 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.

Interesting.

Everytime I try to go GbE I find it doesn't work out.  When I tried last 
January I found I didn't have the bandwidth on my PCI bus to really transfer 
any data faster than Fast Ethernet speeds.

Actually, the real reason I was looking into GbE was backups from my 
fileserver to the backup server, but the backup server is an old Katmai? slot 
P3 and even using 'arcfour' as the encryption with ssh, I get less than 100 
Mbps throughput.  So, I guess my problem is the encryption overhead 
associated with running `rsync` over `ssh`.  Oh well.

> 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).

Neat.

> 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.

Wow, that is insanely cheap.  I have a GbE switch.  Almost makes we want to 
buy a few, but I never seem to need to push enough data around to warrant it.  
Maybe I'll buy two and move stuff between my workstation and fileserver over 
NFS and see what happens.

-- 

Jason Boxman
http://edseek.com/ - Linux and FOSS stuff