Super Cheap NIC's, worth it?

[uberlad]

Ok, I've found myself a 10/100 NIC for £5, plus about £5 postage on an order (unless I spend over 100 quid). I presume that this will be running off a realtek chipset, and I doubt it'll be bus mastering or any of that high quality PCI jazz.

The question is, is it worth paying twice that for a Netgear card with busmastering etc etc? It's only for a home network and pretty much anythgin has to be faster than the 10Mbit we have now.

So, should I pay for quality? or kit out all the machines in the network with 100 Mbit cards for about 20 quid?

Uberlad

[borat]

dont buy netgear as ive had several and they all broke within 18 months of unpacking. try to see if you can get some us robotics ones as ive seen some of these fairly cheap from places like dabs. but for 5 quid you cant really go wrong even if they do break youve only got the hassle of replacing them(fairly minimal).

[uberlad]

Yep, that's what I was thinking.

It'll be a bonus if the cards are supported in Linux, then I can kit the server out with one as well.

Uberlad

[Fat Tone]

I just got one for £8, works on XP straight away, although it does download a driver update. 100mbps no probs

[VJ]

Linux-support can often be a problem, even with expensive cards. The 3c900b Combo is not supported, while the 3c900 Combo is . I have both cards, visually there is virtually no difference, yet the standard Linux drivers only supports the latter. The 3com drivers don't work on higher kernelversions, so I can't get the 3c900b card to work under Linux.
(And this is not easy to find out: when booting, the card does return its MAC-address when requested by the driver, yet refuses to run any network ).

Cheap cards often support the NE2000 driver as standard, so sometimes cheaper cards tend to give less problems...


Jörg

[uberlad]

yeah, the server is running Smoothwall, and is just a touch more picky about what net cards it likes. I doubt i'll have any problem with the most basic realtek chipset, which is what I presume is on these cards.

They are EBuyer own brand cards btw if anyone realises they can't live without one - www.ebuyer.com

Uberlad

[cbman]

Cheapies are the way to go until you can get a good one at a good price... (Like all my 3Com cards I got free from people doing business upgrades to systems that had onboard LAN)

[Gurm]

Problem with Netgear is their build quality. SUPER dodgy.

- Gurm

[Wombat]

One reason 3com has iffy Linux support is that they will often make minor changes in their silicon without telling anybody, not even a revision number change. The changes in chip operation break the Linux drivers, but 3com doesn't bother to tell anybody that the change is out there.

[Gurm]

And then the only way to GET the drivers is to call up some guy at MIT who never ever answers his e-mail... and hope that he figured it out this time.

- Gurm