On Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:59:57 +0200, Stefan Malte Schumacher wrote:
>Hello

>As the subject says : I want to upgrade my Home LAN to Gigabit
>Ethernet. I have already decided on a switch but I am still unsure
>which NIC to buy. Do you have any recommendations ? I am currently
>considering simply going for a GA311 from Netgear, which has a Realtek
>Chipset.

I've gone through three pci-express cards.

First was a Rosewill RC-401, based on the et131x chipset, ran fine for
10 months and died. I hear that there's a bug in the driver that can
damage the hardware. Suse is not recomending their latest release
becaue of this.

Second was an intel EXPI9300PTBLK, based on the e1000e chipset. It would die after
30 minutes to 8 hours of operation. RMA'd board did same thing.
Error I've seen in dmesg is on a currently unresolved ticket open for
the driver.

My current card is a D-Link DGE-560T, using the sky2 driver. It works
like a champ.

For your switch, make sure it has a decent amount of buffer memory.

Stefan Malte Schumacher wrote:

> Hello
>
> As the subject says : I want to upgrade my Home LAN to Gigabit
> Ethernet. I have already decided on a switch but I am still unsure
> which NIC to buy. Do you have any recommendations ? I am currently
> considering simply going for a GA311 from Netgear, which has a Realtek
> Chipset.
>
>
> Bye
> Stefan

I installed GA311's in four machines on my network about a year ago.
Had no problems with them. A couple of weeks ago, I installed
TrendNet TEG-PCITXR nics on two additional machines. These use the
same RTL8169 chipset as the NetGear cards. They work fine, cost less.

You won't find that the network upgrade results in a 10X speedup of
the network, but it will be noticeably faster.

On Sep 24, 12:57*pm, AZ Nomad wrote:

> First was a Rosewill RC-401, based on the et131x chipset, ran fine for
> 10 months and died. *I hear that there's a bug in the driver that can
> damage the hardware. Suse is not recomending their latest release
> becaue of this.

If you're talking about the issue I think you're talking about, it's
fixed in the RC-401-EX. (Fixed by using a totally different chipset,
Marvell instead of Agere.)

DS