# Need a cheap gbit NIC?



## Dru (Dec 18, 2009)

Hi all, hope this doesnt sound like spam, as I could care less if people bought any, but I just thought I share a link to some cheap D-Link Gbit NIC's that I came across, incase anyone might need one or a few.

http://www.digitalet.com/Items/NET-DGE-530T

$9.70..free shipping. Theyre refurbished, but come with everything.

Listed on the HCL using the sk(4) driver.

Snagged a couple myself, guess I'll know within 7-10 days to how well they work.


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Dec 18, 2009)

I have a similar Dlink, 528-T laying here around somewhere.
I tested the card, but it doesn't achieve the speed I get on the
onboard NIC's in my HP servers.
About 88 MB/s for the Broadcom NICs in the HP servers and around,
67MB/s for this Dlink card. The lower speed is most likely because
it runs on a PCI-bus.


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## Dru (Dec 19, 2009)

Yeah, I wouldnt imagine they are as fast, I just had an extra Milan Gbit switch laying around, and a recent server I brought home has onboard broadcom Gbit chipsets also, so I figured Id upgrade the little LAN on the cheap.

Running a cam on the server, and although Im far from maxing the connection, was hoping to reduce the latency a little if possible. Just using the onboard 100Mbit Realtek as of now on this machine.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Dec 19, 2009)

The price looks good, but can someone explain the advantage of gbit (if any) on a pci bus?


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## Dru (Dec 19, 2009)

http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/nethub/article.php/3485486/Squeeze-Your-Gigabit-NIC-for-Top-Performance.htm


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Dec 19, 2009)

OJ said:
			
		

> The price looks good, but can someone explain the advantage of gbit (if any) on a pci bus?



It's a cheap way to add a gigabit ethernet port to older computers
or should I see desktop computers that do not have an onboard gigabit NIC. You can even plug this one in a PCI-X slot. 
Most servers have PCI-X slots, which are mostly not available on normal cheap desktop PCs. PCI-E (10) gigabit ethernet cards are also available, but are still more expensive and you require ofcourse an available PCI-E slot.


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Dec 19, 2009)

Dru said:
			
		

> Yeah, I wouldnt imagine they are as fast, I just had an extra Milan Gbit switch laying around, and a recent server I brought home has onboard broadcom Gbit chipsets also, so I figured Id upgrade the little LAN on the cheap.
> 
> Running a cam on the server, and although Im far from maxing the connection, was hoping to reduce the latency a little if possible. Just using the onboard 100Mbit Realtek as of now on this machine.



The PCI NIC is more than fast enough. 
I even used gimp to process 15Mp images through an ssh connection with this NIC and it works fine. For file transfer I've noticed that the bottleneck is still the harddisk.


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