I need people out here to give me their suggestions on which Ethernet card would be the best and that you yourself would recommend that I use for both Window$ and Linux... If possible I would appreciate the Brand and Model of the NIC.....

I currently have a D-Link DFE-550TX, but some of my friends suggest 3COM and LinkSys,
which one of these two would be best...

Thank You to all who respond.. :

3com's are good, but my personnal favourite has to be any NIC that has the Realtek 8139 Chipset. Works perfect, and it does exactly what is says on the box.

Go to the following site:

http://www.dslwebserver.com/main/nictest.html

I am in the same bind. I have a $50 3com card already and need a second. I have been looking at the (much cheaper) Net Gear cards. I am extremely interested to know just why the 3com cards are so much more expensive. Do Net Gear cards work well in Linux?

Hi,

I am running Redhat 7.2 and Windows 98 and use 2 Linksys LNE100TX Version 5 Eatherfast network cards in my box. They're great and fairly cheap (~$20.00 each).

Jon

REALTEK 8139

though their expensive (around $50 range) i'd recommend the Intel Pro/100 S Desktop Adapter. I run them on about 50 various Win machines and about 6 linux box's and have never had any sort of problem with them whatsoever (in fact they've solved problems i had with other cards).

I run a Realtek 8139 based card, works perfectly in Windows and Linux (Surecom EP-320X-R)

only cost me $25AU as well

Okay, a lot of votes for RealTek... grumble grumble grumble

I swear if you know of any used hardware store nearby, they have 3Com gear in a $5-10 bin somewhere. Anything PCI will work without mercy.

Really I posted in order to warn you about one of the Linksys brands, sometimes packaged as Network Everywhere, available at CompUSAs, OfficeDepots, all over the place, and they're usually in the ballpark of $10. They're tulip driver, and they mod the chipset or the timer, or something like every three weeks, so whatever you distro's pre-compiled tulip.o is, is always just a little too old for their newest quirk. I've only had one distro catch one of these cards right off the bat. I like to compile from source, so these things don't bug me, good card actually, but this would be a headache for pretty much anyone else.

Cheers,

Finegan

i use linksys lne100tx nics and never have any problems with them using the tulip drivers.. new i think run about 20 to 30 bucks..

I was talking about the nc100 v2, which can be avoided here

Word,

Finegan

I aint no hardware expert but i have been led to believe that the cheaper cards use more system resources. Guess if that is true it dont really matter with machines these days.

Personally i have a Intel Pro/100 S and a Realtek 8139 based card, i cant notice any diff between them (other than price), will just have to who outlasts who, i paid 4x more for the Intel one so it best last a long time if it is to outdo the realtek.

Ave tryed the Realtek in :

Caldera
Red Hat 7.1
Mandrke 7.2 and 8
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
Smoothwall

well.. seems like a landlside to the rtl8139 chipset to me. I've never had any problem with them, although i've heard somethign about problem with the way they transfer compressed files, whcih can make machines hang. probably fixed long ago tho, if it ever was a real problem