Realtek 8111B LAN Chipset

[Michel Talon]

Bruce Evans said:
> I also want a cheap PCI/e NIC that works well with drivers back to
> FreeBSD-4 like my plain PCI bge and em NICs do.  I doubt that any
> popular motherboard will have anything better than a cheap PCI/e NIC.

I have recently upgraded an old machine with a good AGP video card to
a Core 2 Duo processor. I have found an Asrock motherboard which
supports such processor, but also both AGP and PCI-e video cards,
both IDE and SATA disks, etc. so one can keep old parts. The chipset
is from VIA and works well as far as i can see, and moreover doesn't
overheat and supports passive cooling. The integrated NIC is the
traditional  ViaRhine, and it works under all versions of
FreeBSD. Audio is supported by hda driver in recent FreeBSD.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=4COREDUAL-VSTA
This mobo is very cheap (around 50 euros here). Coupled to a cheap
Core 2 Duo this gives a good and *very quiet* machine for a surprising
small amount of money (i spent less than 150 euros for the mobo,
the processor and a new power supply). The performance is light years
ahead of the previous Athlon, and the fan sound which was very present is
now almost unaudible.

-- 

Michel TALON