Charlie said:
You do realize that gigabit lan is downward compatible. Any (at least
I think any) device rated gigabit for lan will work with slower
devices, but of course at the slower speed. ie, if everything in your
home lan is gigabit, it should work at gigabit speed. However, if say,
your router is 100 Mb rated. than that's the speed of your system no
matter what lan card you pur in your computer.
It's true, there is a certain level of compatibility. Some chips
will be 10/100/1000BT devices, meaning they could do all three
interface standards.
There are differences between gigabit capable LAN chips. The
very cheapest cards you can find, are not always the best. For
example, the card I have based on RealTek RTL8169SC. By experiment
and extrapolation, you need a Core 2 processor core running
at around 4GHz, to make a card based on that chip transfer files
at the maximum rate. Instead of getting 117MB/sec, you might
see 70MB/sec if your PC has a "weak" processor. Several of
my other computers, have GbE chips from Intel and Marvell,
and those run at the full rate, even using a P4 at 3GHz
or an AMD processor at 2.2GHz.
So the OP "donut" is headed in the right direction, by looking
at an Intel product. They charge more for them, but it
may also be better than a competing $13 card.
The Intel site has downloads on it, and as long as the OS you
plan to use has a driver (very likely to be true), then the
card can be used there.
If you can't get the product name like PWLA8390MT to get you
a driver, you can translate product name to chip name using the
table here. PWLA8390MT = 82540EM as an example.
http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009221.htm?wapkw=(PWLA8390MT)
I tried that here, and I get a better response for 82540EM than
I do for PWLA8390MT.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchResult.aspx?lang=eng&keyword="82540em"
Paul
