I just experienced one of those weird WTF moments. For whatever reason my on-board NIC stopped working. I powered down, swapped cables, nothing seemed to succeed. I powered down one more time, powered up, and the NIC was again working. Who knows?

All is again fine in this section of the universe, but I think I might want to buy a spare NIC.

The motherboard is an Asus M2NPV-VM. I have been happy with the board. The on-board 1 Gbps NIC is part of the Nvidia MCP51 chip set (Nvidia nForce 430 MCP51 controller, Marvell PHY).

I'd like equivalent performance. Therefore I'd appreciate recommendations for a 1 Gbps PCI or PCI Express NIC.

Not exactly Slackware related but since that is all I run on this box, this forum is the better place to post the question to ensure Slackware compatibility.

Thanks again.

A realtek 8169, not 8111, 8168, but a real 8169. I bought a couple of these from Microcenter (Trendnet brand I believe) for ~$15 to replace the crappy on board models. Supports jumbo frames upto 7200, sweet spot seems to be 6000.

If you want to spend a little more money, Intel is said to have better cards. With the intel gigabit cards, they support large frames (9000) and better XOR offload compared to the 8169. Newegg has these for ~$35.

I have an Intel EXPI9301CTBLK, as listed on Newegg.com, which is a PCI Express NIC.
This has Intel's 82574L chip, and it worked out of the box for me. Cost about $30.

Even though I purchased a "retail" box, it only contained the NIC in a plastic container.
There was no driver CD or manual.

As far as Windows support, for those who dual-boot, the NIC is recognized and drivers install automatically in Windows 7. I don't know about Vista, but with Windows XP you will have to download drivers from Intel's website to get the NIC working.

I had a similar board and the same problem would occur from time to time. As you say it was just a matter of powering off the motherboard and turning it back on again.
Pretty sure it was just something buggy in the kernel version (slackware-12.0 from memory) and not a sign of hardware failure.

If you do want to replace it I'd highly recommend the Intel GT desktop adaptors. The Realtek NICs do work fine out of the box but are the "softmodem" of the network cards.

You can check the HCL, unfortunately there's not too many listed. I agree that realtek cards work well. I've also found intel cards to work well.

I got to thinking the same thing a few hours after I posted.

The problem started immediately after I had just ran my first pass with testing Current. The kernel would not boot. I received a bunch of gobbledygook on the screen. The system locked hard. I had to press the reboot button.

I never finished investigating that problem because I got sidetracked with the NIC. The LEDs did not blink and for about 15 to 20 minutes I thought I was hosed. Then I found a BIOS setting to run a cable check during POST. That probably is what restored the NIC.

I have spare machines that I could use to surf the web and check email, but they are old (circa PI, PII) and are not much fun to use with a modern browser. I used one of those machines to verify the router and ISP was working okay. I had a sinking feeling that I might be stuck using one of them for several days until I obtained a new NIC. Therefore having a backup/spare NIC for my primary box seems prudent. Usually A Good Thing to have at least one "Plan B."

Thanks everybody for the responses.