Intel 82574L looses to Realtek RTL8111E Ethernet

A Former User

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..

dhatz

@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

A Former User

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

dhatz

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 …

phil.davis

@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.

A Former User

@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.

tirsojrp

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

n2qcn

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.

A Former User

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..

Guest

Now compare a RTL8111e to an Intel i210.