On 2006/10/02 10:54, Jacob Yocom-Piatt wrote: > i am planning on grabbing some PXE capable NICs in the next few days and would > like to know if any particular cards are better than others. in the vein of > intel being crappy, i am actively avoiding any intel-based chipsets.
fxp(4) are generally the most decent you'll find for little money. You can buy them second-hand and avoid lining Intel's coffers (the earliest ones won't have PXE, but you can probably look up the part number). > i'm looking for something cheap and reliable, the 3com 3c905c pops up near the > top of the list on froogle: Those are xl(4), they're ok but istr having some problem with them, may have been connected with vlans. If you look at the list archives they're not highly recommended. I think there are some cheaper dlink that do pxe (probably rl or re). You'll probably find some linksys, allied-telesyn, smc etc. Watch out for the difference between cards with a socket that can take an EPROM to do PXE, and cards that have it supplied. Depending on your combination of skills, curiosity, and ratio of time:money available, you may be able to find a suitable module from etherboot.org (or from a motherboard using a suitable onboard nic with PXE support) to add to your bios and re-flash it to support a nic you already have. http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/biosmodule
