January 12th 09, 01:40 PM
posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte
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Best Ethernet NIC with a Gigabyte?
On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:40:31 -0500, Paul wrote:
Keith Lee wrote:
All:
I have an older Gigabyte motherboard with an AMD 1100 CPU. What would
be the best NIC to work with it? I
am hoping to get DSL soon. Thank you.
Keith
At one time, Ethernet devices were categorized according to their
performance. A high performance device was one that could handle
back-to-back packets with ease. For example, early in my career, I
worked on a product which only had two buffers, and that would be
considered a low performance product. (Of course, the product
documentation doesn't say that :-) )
That was a long time ago (just after Ethernet was introduced), and most
chips today are fully featured. A typical good design uses ring buffers
and DMA, for both transmit and receive. Some even have various kinds of
offloading features, but I haven't been keeping track of that stuff.
This is an example of a chip you can get on a $10 NIC card. The document
here claims, the receive side has a ring buffer, while the transmit side
uses fixed buffers. And I think that causes a slight bit of grief for
the software people.
http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~cruse/cs326...mmersGuide.pdf
So as long as you avoid certain of the $10 NIC cards, you'll be getting
whatever performance your OS can manage.
Occasionally, you'll run into an old chipset, that has some problems
with its PCI bus, but for DSL download speeds, I wouldn't expect even
the most broken PCI implementation to limit your fun. Some of these PCI
bus problems become more evident, when you try to transfer files between
two PCs.
There is room on some OSes, for link tuning. For example, as a joke, I
installed Win98SE on my current Core2 system. I did some download
testing, and noted the usual crappy performance. I found a package that
claims to modify some TCPIP settings in Win98, and after I used it, I
was able to download at 500KB/sec (full link rate), just like in WinXP.
So if your performance sucks, it isn't always the hardware that has a
problem - it can also be the window size/delay product which is causing
it. I'd give you a link to the package, but it's on a disk which is
currently disconnected.
Paul
Paul:
Thanks!
Keith Lee
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