IMHO, Nothing beats a good intel NIC.
I'm a big fan of the intel pro/1000GT.
In terms of performance, I think it is more determined by the card
chipset.
Nick Olsen
Network Operations
(877) 804-3001 x106
Anyone can share the Network card experience
ls onborad PCI Expresscard better or Plug in slot PCI Express card good?
How are their performance in Gig transfer rate?IMHO, Nothing beats a good intel NIC.
I'm a big fan of the intel pro/1000GT.
In terms of performance, I think it is more determined by the card chipset.
The e1000 & e1000e linux driver docs include READMEs which detail some of the diffs between the various chipsets used by these NICs:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=9180&keyword=e1000&lang=eng
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=15817&keyword=e1000e&lang=eng
Some support jumbo frames, some do not. I've seen some server motherboards come with two different on-board 8257x chipsets on the same board -- one that supports jumbo and one that does not (yikes!)
The driver can make a huge difference in performance. If your driver sucks, don't expect performance to be much better. e1000/e1000e in Linux has a lot of tweakables, and getting these running at line-rate in a LAN is not that difficult. You motherboard manual (bus topology) and output of 'lspci -tv' can help you determine the best PCI slot to stick the card into to avoid contention. Some cards support checksum offloading, 'ethtool -S' can often tell you whether that's working or not, etc.
-Chris