The Realtek chip shows up in several of Netgear's gigabit Ethernet adapters. I have the Realtek 8169 IC in my desktop's GA311 PCI NIC as well as my notebook's GA511 PCMCIA NIC. (The two machines run different kernels and are different arches, hence the two kernels and distros listed above.) The r8169 driver does work for these cards and it was in both machines' kernels. The cards were auto-detected if the module was present in the kernel. Note that the jumbo frames on the 8169 have a MTU of 7200 and not the full 9000- the IOCTL will fail if you try to set a MTU of 9000 on these cards.

Performance is pretty good with the 8169-based cards, especially once jumbo frames are enabled. Without the jumbo frames (e.g. MTU is left at 1500) the throughput will be about 150 Mbps or so. The cards are very reasonably-priced- the desktop PCI NIC was $20 and the notebook PCMCIA NIC was $40. Now I just wish that one of these chips would show up on a PCIe card for those same prices...

Wonderful, cheap controller. May not be able to keep up with $200 cards, but it's the best "bang for the buck". Installed in a diskless workstation server, which connects to a 24 port switch, which connects to clients via 100baseTX. Very stable, clients boot fast, I think the card is actually being held back by the hard drives. Buy this unless you like to waste money or you're connecting hundreds of clients to a sever.