Having dealt a lot with installing various NICs at UWA and elsewhere, it is indeed true that RealTek NICs are "dodgy" to say the least. File transfer speeds and gaming seem to be the most affected, where you might get the occasional "pause" in transfers - not all that bad for transferring small files, but for gaming it inevitably leads to lag, or a rocket hitting you before you even know it. :)
But for $20/$25, you get what you pay for. I used to install RealTek NICs at the Mech Eng department but after a bad run with about 3 of them, we switched over to using 3Com cards. For around $50 we've never had a problem with them. Having said all the above, I've never put a RealTek NIC in a mac yet, but personally I'd liken it to putting on $2 rubber strips on a $300,000 porsche. ;) Cheers, daz. -----Original Message----- From: Antony N. Lord [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RealTek Chipset NICs An interesting thread ran a short while ago on the UCC list (UWA's Computer Club) detailing how many people found the RealTek based NICs to be flakey and certainly not recommended for game play / "mission critical" systems (at least on PC based systems.) I do note that Apple System Profiler gathers no substantial info about them but I have yet to see one give me grief and they certainly seem to be working at 100 base (so says my switch.) Let me know before I spend money on putting RelTek cards in several 10base Macs... Cheers, Antony. --
