Re: which network card should one buy ?

[Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>]

Christoph Neerfeld wrote:
> 
> Hi !
> 
> We are using several 3 Com cards for some years now, but all those different
> and sometimes buggy revisions (905,b,c...) are getting on my nervs.
> 
> Does anyone have a suggestion which network cards one should buy ?

There is no long term solution - all card families with backward compatibility
have problems at some point.  See the Tulip, the Lance/PCnet - all designed
to be as compatible as possible, but you need a specific driver to get them
working properly.

I have a few 3C905B cards here and I'm pretty disappointed by the number of
problems you bump into.  I have a card which fails to autonegotiate back to
100Mbps if it was plugged into a 10Mbps hub just once.

The only 10/100 cards I bought recently are Realtek 8139 based cards and
had no problems whatsoever (except the usual driver bugs).  They are fast
(sometimes faster then 3Com cards), and dirt cheap.  They only do busmaster
transfers, so the CPU load is very reasonable.  My supplier sells them
at 22-25 DEM (approx. USD 10-12) in quantities of 10.  There are quite a few
manufacturers making cards with the RTL8139 chip (Longshine, LevelOne, ...),
but sometimes the names are a bit odd.  The Longshine card is called
LCS-8038TX-R - but it has no RTL8038 chip on it (that would be a NE2000 clone).

Just don't look at the datasheet of the thing (the internal design is odd).
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