(OT) Bad NICs (was Collision Lights go Crazy)

[Denis Sbragion]

Hello,

At 06.18 12/05/99 +1000, Stephen L Arnold wrote:
...
>My experience has been just the opposite (my old 3COM 509 combo-
>everything ISA card works great with linux and windoze, but RealTek 
>based cards suck).  Also, the Intel cards have a few known bugs 
>(see the linux ethernet HOWTO) in the hardware/firmware that cause 
>problems under DOS/windoze and linux.  I just spent a number of 
>hours testing and troubleshooting a few ne2000 PCI cards (with the 
>RealTek 8029 chip and the WinBond chip).  The upshot?  They all 
>suck, don't waste your money or time on them.  The sad part is that 
...

I disagree. In my experience simply many cards don't follow strictly the
ethernet standard. This means that if you use all realtek, or all 3Com, or
all whatever you want NICs in a network you usually get good performance.
If you mix different models (sometimes even if the chipset is the same!)
it's not so unusual to get performance problems. In this situations weird
things happen. Sometimes simply changing  a little the cable length could
change the situation, increasing or lowering performances. Probably the
cheaper chips are out of standard and the good ones are not, but I'm not so
sure of this.

Just my 2 cents.

Bye!
--
	Denis Sbragion
	InfoTecna
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