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    Intel 82574L looses to Realtek RTL8111E Ethernet

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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    • stephenw10S
      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
      last edited by

      @SunCatalyst:

      my budget just for testing new machines each year is around 1Million Dollars…

      :o OK
      I'll upgrade my earlier statement to 'definitely more hardware than I've ever seen'.

      Steve

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      • M
        margen
        last edited by

        I've used 3 RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX NICs (2 WAN in failover + 1 LAN) for the past 3-4 years. It's a very old non-server platform that mostly does NAT for 30-40 clients and barely pushes the 100/100 mbit WAN to its limit, and not for longer than a couple of hours a day. The office-hours utilization would be around 30/30 mbit on average.

        It's nothing like the above scenarios, but still I have to say that I have NEVER experienced any problems with the NICs. Before I had to upgrade to 2.0.2 I logged over 1 year uptime.

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        • ?
          A Former User
          last edited by

          i have to agree that the equipment should be donated somewhere or resold… not destroyed...

          MOST of our Gigabit connections are at about 80% utilization (which is really damn close to
          what the physical hardware can transmit on the wire after the tcp stack).

          we HAVE to have systems that dont fail under the load or crash... currently looking for 10GE Nics at the
          moment to get some relief as our traffic gets to be more and more each year...
          10Ge seems to be ALOT thinner pickings that are supported under FreeBSD 8.3 (pfsense 2.1 Beta)

          and i DOUBT we will be running intel Nics at 10GE..

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          • D
            dhatz
            last edited by

            @SunCatalyst:

            MOST of our Gigabit connections are at about 80% utilization (which is really damn close to
            what the physical hardware can transmit on the wire after the tcp stack).

            we HAVE to have systems that dont fail under the load or crash… currently looking for 10GE Nics at the
            moment to get some relief as our traffic gets to be more and more each year...
            10Ge seems to be ALOT thinner pickings that are supported under FreeBSD 8.3 (pfsense 2.1 Beta)

            and i DOUBT we will be running intel Nics at 10GE..

            Have you considered configuring 2 x GbE ports in LACP ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

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            • ?
              A Former User
              last edited by

              we have thought about it BUT…... most of our uplink providers DONT support it..
              OR its cheaper to do 10GE drop to us and having to have redundancy built into
              everything , that complicates stuff tremendously

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              • D
                dhatz
                last edited by

                Well FreeBSD-HEAD (what will eventually become FreeBSD 10) has recently updated drivers for several 10 GbE NICs, such as Chelsio, Emulex and Intel. I'm not sure how much of that code has been backported to FreeBSD 8.x though …

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                • P
                  phil.davis
                  last edited by

                  @SunCatalyst - I volunteer with an organisation in Nepal - www.inf.org - we have nothing like "western country" bandwidths available, just getting WiMax technology in the last few months with Nepal Telecom guaranteeing >1Mbps to corporate customers! We get our first WiMax connection on Monday. We are not going to saturate any ethernet chip any time soon, so equipment that has some obscure high-performance issue is no big deal. If your corporate has a change of heart, please PM me. We have fund-raising offices in various countries and can easily accept donations of electronics equipment and get it out to Nepal.

                  As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
                  If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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                  • ?
                    A Former User
                    last edited by

                    @phil.davis. if i had a choice i would do something like your suggesting BUT corp policy dictates otherwise.
                    i will be sending you a PM about other possibilities i MAY have for you.

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                    • T
                      tirsojrp
                      last edited by

                      Put me in the list, I work for an NGO that is always struggling with tight budgets for IT infrastructure.

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                      • N
                        n2qcn
                        last edited by

                        FUD can be debilitating.

                        There are bad experiences for both Intel (poor eerpom) and Realtek (poor TSO)

                        There are good experiences for both Intel and Realtek.

                        But at least on paper, the Realtek RTL8111E is a better design (with ECC and CRC) than the  Intel 82574L.

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                        • ?
                          A Former User
                          last edited by

                          ya and on paper that is… BUT MY REAL WORLD experiences tells me....
                          its all dependant on the motherboard manufacturer implementing EVERYTHING perfectly for a Stable system..

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                          • ?
                            Guest
                            last edited by

                            Now compare a RTL8111e to an Intel i210.

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