>> Anyone can share the Network card experience >> ls onborad PCI Expresscard better or Plug in slot PCI Express card good? >> How are their performance in Gig transfer rate? > IMHO, Nothing beats a good intel NIC. > I'm a big fan of the intel pro/1000GT. > In terms of performance, I think it is more determined by the card chipset.
The e1000 & e1000e linux driver docs include READMEs which detail some of the diffs between the various chipsets used by these NICs: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=9180&keyword=e1000&lang=eng http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=15817&keyword=e1000e&lang=eng Some support jumbo frames, some do not. I've seen some server motherboards come with two different on-board 8257x chipsets on the same board -- one that supports jumbo and one that does not (yikes!) The driver can make a huge difference in performance. If your driver sucks, don't expect performance to be much better. e1000/e1000e in Linux has a lot of tweakables, and getting these running at line-rate in a LAN is not that difficult. You motherboard manual (bus topology) and output of 'lspci -tv' can help you determine the best PCI slot to stick the card into to avoid contention. Some cards support checksum offloading, 'ethtool -S' can often tell you whether that's working or not, etc. -Chris -- Chris Tracy <ctr...@es.net> Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
