Re: NIC differences
Tim Fletcher (tim@night-shade.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 23:39:14 +0100 (BST)
> > I have been shopping around to purchase 60 NIC cards. There seems to be a
> > broad range in prices between $8 to $100 for PCI bus master NIC cards.
> > What type of performance differences would I see in using say a $10 bus
> > master Generic NIC (10/100) card instead of a say $50 to $100 3COM
> > (10/100) NIC. Is there any real justification for purchasing the more
> > expensive cards for creating a LINUX cluster
> >
>
> As far as the expensive NICs go, I would suggest you to stay away from
> 3com cards. I have found from expearance that they fail quite often. not
> to say that 3com wont ship you new cards to replace them, but do you realy
> want to mess with them. From my expearance (the past 1.5 years) about 25%
> of all 3com NICs come from the box are bad. Personaly, I use Intel
> NICs. They are similar in price to the 3coms, and similar in performance.
I also dislike 3com (their isa one's were nice, the pci ones have
feature's) I got more syslog errors about my cyclone in my box in a week
than the dec tulip gave in a year (about 10 transmitter errors on the same
hardware). Intel eepro10/100's have a problem woth multicast when using
the in kernel driver (you need a newer one form Don Becker). I think that
your best bet for price / performance is to look at the tulip clones
(Netgear do one)
--
Tim Fletcher .~.
/V\ L I N U X
tjdf@st-andrews.ac.uk // \ >Don't fear the penguin<
tim@night-shade.demon.co.uk /( )\
^^-^^
"Courage will take you to the most dangerous places on Earth.
Overwhelming firepower will see you safely through them."
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