Graeme Robinson was once rumoured to have said: > On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Amanda Wynne wrote: > > > I'm using several of the RTL8139 10/100 cards with no problems. Cost about > > $20.00 each at the markets. > > I concur with Amanda - I have deployed tens of these cards over the past 4 > years with no failures and never with noticeably bad performance. I've > used Intel cards equally reliably where there was some percieved need for > better performance but notably without any performance gain. BTW the > realtek cards are 10/100 now for the same price bracket. OTOH I've had > significant grief from FA310's (under win and nix platforms) and go out of > my way to avoid them.
You're dodging the wrong card. the FA310 had a few driver issues along the way. The shipped DOS drivers are buggy. I think I only ever succeeded in getting the Win9x ones to work once. Then I stowed my FA310s for about 6 months. When I switched back to the FA310TX's this time, they just worked in Linux 2.4, and Win2k and XP. Of course, I don't think Netgear were responsible for any of these drivers. YMMV. Just realise that the rtl8139's are simplistic cards (hence their compatibility), but you trade off their simplicity against the amount of CPU time in the host they burn. [One of the reasons why getting rid of the RTL8139 gave such a dramatic performance increase was we were using it in a K6-200...] Personally, I'll only use RTL8139s when I can't use anything else. If you want to be stubborn and avoid the FA310s, then go second-hand hunting for 3c905s, EEPro100s and DEC 21x40s (Tulip). I got my 3c905s via the markets for around $25-60 each. My DEC 21x40s I got for $10 each. As for card failure rate, the only card I've ever had fail on me was an RTL8129, which blew an SMT component on the card leaving a nasty black scorch mark and a rather useless ethernet card. All my other failures were caused by lack of usable drivers. Yuck. C. -- --==============================================-- Crossfire | This email was brought to you [EMAIL PROTECTED] | on 100% Recycled Electrons --==============================================-- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
