Recommendations for cheap PCI-E network adapter ?

[John Lyon]

To answer your first question, the better drivers might be in -CURRENT but
I would never know as I run -RELEASE/STABLE. :-)  However, I can think of
any number of possibilities (one, some, or none of which may be true),
including:
    - Licensing incompatibilities
    - Regressions for older hardware (I can confirm based on personal
experience that the latest vendor drivers perform worse on my ~10 year old
RealTek cards than the FreeBSD supplied drivers)
    - Lack of awareness (the RealTek website lists their drivers as being
for FreeBSD 8.x but they are really for 11.x and RealTek just never updated
their site)
    - Other reasons known to those more knowledgeable.

For your second question, my pricing information is a few years old.  When
I searched, I was looking on Ebay and Amazon for used parts.  I would not
be surprised if there were a slight ($1-$2) price inflation between then
and now.


--------------------------------
John L. Lyon
PGP Key Available At:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/skmedtscs0tgex7/02150BFE.asc

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 3:13 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com>
wrote:

>
> In message <CAKfTJoWLPvC28=kPWE5oJYW87p+qbjB6zKwSpzfOoTjK1wBTWw at mail.gm
> ail.com>,
> John Lyon <johnllyon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >What's your use case?  If this is for a home box, developer box, or
> >something that is not "enterprise production," then I wouldn't worry about
> >RealTek cards bought in the last 5 years.  Their 10/100 cards from 15
> years
> >ago were crap, which is how they earned their bad reputation.  However,
> the
> >continuing dismissiveness towards RealTek is mostly undeserved in my
> >opinion.
>
> This is just for my home network.  Not "mission critical", but I don't want
> my equipment being eternally flaky, of course.  And I am not enthused about
> the possibility of having to frequently build and/or install a new driver
> that isn't in the stock FreeBSD releases.
>
> >The issue currently is the state of the drivers themselves and not the
> >cards.  For example, the drivers themselves that FreeBSD includes have
> >problems.  However, you can always download the source code to the latest
> >FreeBSD drivers from the RealTek website and all of the "bugs" disappear.
>
> Hummm... Am I being naive to ask why, if there are better drivers
> available,
> they do not get rolled into -CURRENT?
>
> >That said, if you're cost sensitive, buy your NICS used.
>
> Oh yes!  This is for a "new" system build for which I am buying everything
> as used parts.  Depending on which specific motherboard I decide to go
> with,
> I may or may not have a good old fashioned PCI slot to work with on the
> motherboard.
>
> If I do, then I'm good, because as I discovered last night, I have/had,
> sitting
> inside a box of old parts up on my top shelf, no fewer than four (4)
> Realtek
> cards, two (2) Intel cards, two (2) Netgear cards, one (1) HP card, and
> even
> one ancient 3Com 3C509B card.  (I'm pretty sure that all of these are
> 10/100
> cards.  They are definitely all PCI.)
>
> The problem is that all these cards are verging on being obsolete now,
> because
> many newer motherboards... and even ones that are several years old now...
> have
> dropped the old fashioned PCI slots altogether (e.g. ASUS B85M-G).
>
> >Last time I checked, the going rate for
> >used Intel NICS was something like $10 per port + shipping.  I think used
> >Broadcom NICS were similar in pricing.
>
> Really?  Where?
>
> I checked on FleaBay and as far as -Intel- PCI-E cards, the best I could
> find
> was about $12 USD.
>
> I don't know how to search FleaBay for Broadcom-based cards, because I
> don't
> know any relevant model numbers (or even manufacturer names).
>
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