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Date:      Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:12:29 -0800
From:      Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
To:        John <john@starfire.mn.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Recommendations for NICs?
Message-ID:  <9F075D36-72FF-4B40-B9AD-918808369D3D@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100121112757.A11858@starfire.mn.org>
References:  <20100121112757.A11858@starfire.mn.org>

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Hi--

On Jan 21, 2010, at 9:27 AM, John wrote:
> This used to be a hot topic long ago, but now seems to have become
> rather dormant.  Does that mean that all NICs are pretty much
> commodity with all the good features (unaligned scatter/gather,
> etc), or does it just mean that machine performance has grown to
> the point where we don't care anymore?  The hardware.html page
> tells me what may owrk, but not what may work WELL.  The on-board
> NIC uses the fxp driver.  Should I look for another card that uses
> the same driver?

Intel (fxp, em) and Broadcom (bce, bge) make fine NICs, and the older DEC/Intel 21x4x Tulip series (dc/de) was quite good as well.  The Marvel Yukon (msk) and nVidia MCP (nfe/nve) seem to be OK (although older nVidia hardware had bugs); the Realtek (re/rl) and VIA (vr/vge) are at the bottom of the heap, especially the older pre-gigabit hardware.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck




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