Hi all,

I am looking to fit out a few PC's with Gbit cards to go with the Cat6 newly laid cable and new Gbit switch [on its way].

any cards recommended over others ?
I was looking at the Netgear GA311 but some googling (http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-networking/63410-netgear-ga311-not-running-gigabit-speeds.html]here and [url=http://www.phoronix.com/lch/?k=entry&l=249&t=Netgear%20GA311]here]) seems to think thats not a wise choice.

Anyone use the Intel PRO/1000 GT ? Seems a decent price, although more then the NetGear.

All we use at work in add-on cards is Netgear. We just started migrating to Gbit and so far very few problems. We also have some machines with Intel onboard and no problems there either.

Traditionally the Intel ethernet chipsets have been the highest performing and most reliable. It used to be that pretty much every ethernet card you could lay your hands on was supported by Linux, but with a lot of new chipsets coming out for GigE many hardware vendors have kept their documentation closed as a "trade secret" and therefor there are quite a few GigE cards that aren't supported by some Open Source OSs.

Your best bet is to check the website for the distro you're running and see if they have a list of compatible hardware. Failing that, you can try "apropos <chipset number>" on your distro of choice and see if it locates any man pages for that device. Of course you would need to get the technical details on the card you're looking at to see what chipset it uses. If your distro doesn't have man pages for different drivers, see if they have a CVS repository that you can search though with CVSweb.

Thanks guys.

I'll make sure to research.

So far votes for both NetGear and Intel. Looking at performance too here [in Linux environment]

Here's a good review.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...h-32bit-2.html

I just purchased an Intel Pro/1000 GT Desktop adapter simply because of the Linux support (driver written by Intel) and the D-Link I was looking at first didn't have good things on google.

I've installed two so far, seems ok, no problems, but they (being Desktop Adapters) come configured with PXE enabled, and they try to boot off the net first. The Intel PXEBOOT file fixed that.

One went into a Celeron 400, and I'm not getting great results, I think it's because of the level of interrupts overwhelms the CPU (CPU pegs @ 100%) but I'm still working on it.