On Tue, 31 May 2005 23:11:24 +0000, Grant Coady wrote:
> Maybe comes with Via chipset, on mobo? Waits for 'sempro' power up...

Mr. Jason bought a new D-Link card.

> The Intel has far larger interface memory 'footprint'. OS transfers
> whole packets to/from it, whereas RTL-8139 transfers packets in little
> pieces. The ubiquitous RTL-8139c probably gets a bad rep. due to poor
> layouts on cheapie NICs, wrong PCI timing issues for MMIO, not so much
> the chip itself.

Wrong, it does because of the chip itself. The NIC chip does not support
many important performace features that offload CPU usage[1], besides that
the design is essentially flawed[2].

[1] http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/
[2] http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/realtek.txt

-- Daniel