Best value PCI 1000BaseT NIC cad?

[CAlbertson]

My Intel Atom board has just one PCI slot and I found the built-in Realtek Ethernet controller has very poor performance. Even the Linux forums talk about bits rates measured by iperf at 200 Mbits/sec I'm seeing just over half that under FreeNAS now that I re-flashed the BIOS with latest image. (It was even worse before the re-flash)

What is the best value NIC? I'm looking around and only finding Realtek powered cards.

 

[bollar]

Seems like Newegg has several Intel NICs in the $30 range. What do you consider value?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...CH&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Description=intel+nic+card

 

[CAlbertson]

Seems like Newegg has several Intel NICs in the $30 range. What do you consider value?

Seems that my Newegg search skills are poor. I looked but did not find these. Now I will have to Google some info on each of them, thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

Intel are THE network card to get for FreeBSD and Linux. They just rock. They're also relatively cheap as bollar's link shows.

Honestly, if you want great performance you should have looked at something better than an Atom. They aren't exactly powerhouses.

Also, using PCI for gigabit will be somewhat limiting. PCI is a parallel bus architecture and Gb LAN can be bottlenecked by it.

 

[CAlbertson]

The Atom was available and power consumption is an important goal. Also this is a "backup server" If it runs at 20 Mbytes/second it will be OK. I have an Intel i3 system I might use if this does not work out but it uses 3X the amount of power and uses fans for cooling.

I knew the Intel NIC was better but I had no idea the Realtek was that poor. I'm seeing only 2.1 MBytes/Second using "dd" from my Mac to the Atom powered freeNAS.

 

[survive]

Hi CAlbertson,

This is what you want:

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/adapters/pro1000gt/pro1000gt-overview.htm

Looks like ~$30.00 new or you can find them on ebay for $10.00.

-Will

 

[jgreco]

Realtek silicon employs a pack of miniature monkeys to take bits from your PCI bus and put them into your ethernet port. From time to time, the monkeys decide to go do other things, and they're never real fast to begin with.

If you have a sufficiently fast CPU and are lucky enough to have the right Realtek silicon, you might manage to get something approximating acceptable performance.

The Intel silicon, on the other hand, was designed by competent engineers who are locked in competition with other vendors; Intel has a vested interest in seeing their CPU's benchmark faster, and their network cards benchmark better, and both those things to happen simultaneously, so you see this magic thing happen where Intel chipsets may have features such as checksum offload and vlan tagging in silicon, because Intel not only got the basics down, but they recognized the need to go further and make a better adapter. Even their desktop adapters are pretty awesome, but for maximum fun/best performance, you can get some of the server grade stuff for that last little oomph.

 

[CAlbertson]

Looks like ~$30.00 new or you can find them on ebay for $10.00.

Thanks. The eBay suggestion is good. There is a guy selling them for $6 with free shipping. I did more testing and yes it was the Realtek NIC that was just killing the read speeds, writes were OK

 

[Stephens]

Do you have a link to the $6 shipped guy? Hopefully he's not from China (the land of knockoff fakes).

 

[jgreco]

Possibly this one but that's $8. These cards should be pretty readily available from any computer recycler, since the world has largely moved on to PCIe.

Look for PWLA8391GT or PWLA8391GTBLK if you're interested in this card.

 

[CAlbertson]

I found one. There are hundreds on eBay.

I doubt anyone from China would ship it for only $6. Actually this seller is in Florida and found that he can ship these little cards first class US mail for about $1 so he sells them for $6 with free shipping. Likely he sells out all of his inventory before the guys asking $10 get their first bid. Anyone using UPS shiping would have to charge to much.

I found a few years back that computers can be free if you offer to take a truck load of them. That is likely what this seller is doing.

Now I need to find a low power (<35W) motherboard and processor on eBay. The Atom will not accept >4GB RAM and the quad core one I have is pulling 110W. Both are unacceptable.