> 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

Thank you for useful information. Glad I got rid of my RTL.
(BTW. Anyone wanna buy (little) used SMC Ethernet Card? ) haha only kidding.