@mattlach: It's sort of academic anyway, my ISP speed maxes at 60mb/s Down. If I put a 1000mb/s card in, that's 940mb/s overhead. Even a 100mb/s is 40mb/s overhead.

If you run Squid proxy caching, it will no longer be academic since your cache disk can probably dish out 60 - 80MB/s easily. Of the 4 cards listed, your best bet will be the Broadcom PCIe.

@mattlach: It's sort of academic anyway, my ISP speed maxes at 60mb/s Down. If I put a 1000mb/s card in, that's 940mb/s overhead. Even a 100mb/s is 40mb/s overhead.

PCI has 133MB/s which is more than enough for gigabit ethernet, even including overhead.

In theory, yes, but I have never been able to get good gigabit speeds over PCI, even with older pretty decent Intel PRO/1000 MT adapters.

I suspect NICs have more PCI overhead than most people think.  For instance, gen1 PCIe x1 has a full duplex bandwidth of 250MB/s, but in typical use it tends to max out at about 1.4Gbit/s, over Ethernet, which is about 179MB/s.  That's ~30% overhead, which means PCI should max out at about 744MB/s.

That being said, most of us don't have gigabit routing speeds, so that may not be an issue.

P.S. Guten Tag Herr Kobold, war ich in der US-Armee. Ich verbrachte 2 Jahre in Nürnberg.

If you are in the USA I would love to try out to get my hands on a refurbished Intel PCI and/or PCIe NIC for
that low budget, but then you will be on the safe side! So this would be the best option for you in my eyes.

The Intel PCI desktop adapters are flooting the market for less then $10 each and the PCIe variant of the
Intel Pro 1000 CT would be able to get for cheap too. So if you have an eBay account try your luck.

I have seen offers on eBay.com for GT and MT adapters for $6.99 or $8.99 refurbished and free shipping or
low shipping fee, if you are over a limit in price. And a CT adapter if it is high in price for $10.99 or $12 so
you can shoot it really cheap.

The from your named cards the nr. 2 would be my first choice here then.

Well, my IPS is only 60d/10u. PCIe x1 will handle, at least, 200MB/s each way. PCI is at least 133MB/s each way.

The question is, which one will off load? PCI @133MB/s is more than fine, IF It Dose checksum, TCP segmentation, and large receive, on board.

P.S. No PCIe x4, only other that I did not list was the PCIe x16 for the video card, that I'm not using.

I believe offload feature of NIC isn't working well on BSD platform, I have both Intel Pro 1000 server & i211AT, enabling offload feature seems to slow down system performance.

BCM95721A211 is NeXtreme series，go for that one!

I know you say you are trying to do things on the cheap, but I really wouldn't use either the onboard Marvell ethernet, or any of the PCI adapters.  PCI just doesn't have the bandwidth to drive gigabit ethernet with all the overhead figured in.  I ahve never used a PCI based gigabit ethernet adapter I was happy with.

Broadcom makes some decent Ethernet adapters.  They are pretty much the only Non-Intel Ethernet chip I would consider using.  Their NetXtreme controllers are actually quite good, and just rival contemporary Intel adapters.  Only problem I see with the one you have is that it is only single port, so you'd have to use the onboard marvel port, or one adapter in a PCI slot, neither of which will be a satisfing experience.

If that PCIe port of yours is x4 or larger, here is what I would do:

Pick up one of these dual port Intel Pro/1000 PT adapters on eBay for $18.  They use the slightly older Intel 82571GB chip, but it is still a solid adapter for your purposes.

Then I'd just diable the on board ethernet port in the BIOS, and just use this intel adapter.

PCI has 133MB/s which is more than enough for gigabit ethernet, even including overhead.

The question is, which one will off load? PCI @133MB/s is more than fine, IF It Dose checksum, TCP segmentation, and large receive, on board.

P.S. No PCIe x4, only other that I did not list was the PCIe x16 for the video card, that I'm not using.

Broadcom makes some decent Ethernet adapters.  They are pretty much the only Non-Intel Ethernet chip I would consider using.  Their NetXtreme controllers are actually quite good, and just rival contemporary Intel adapters.  Only problem I see with the one you have is that it is only single port, so you'd have to use the onboard marvel port, or one adapter in a PCI slot, neither of which will be a satisfing experience.

If that PCIe port of yours is x4 or larger, here is what I would do:

Pick up one of these dual port Intel Pro/1000 PT adapters on eBay for $18.  They use the slightly older Intel 82571GB chip, but it is still a solid adapter for your purposes.

Then I'd just diable the on board ethernet port in the BIOS, and just use this intel adapter.

Only PCI slots in there or also PCIe slots in there…
what kind of mainboard you own? Or the vendor and model name

IBM ThinkCentre 9481-A4U:
  Intel Pentium E2160 / 1.8 GHz , Dual-Core, x64
  2Gb RAM, PC2-5300, DDR2
  Bus 800 MHz
  1Mb L2 per core
  NIC (onboard), Marvell Yukon 88E8056 1000Mb/s
  PCI x2, PCIe x1

On a side note, 20+ years of building my own systems, but as with most systems, NIC was way down on the list. Started off with just Modem (Networking was a BB [schwarzes Brett, Anschlagtafel?] at 2400 baud). My first separate modem was Comcast, and they were pushing USB.

And in all this time, EVERYTHING was on a shoestring (niedrige Kosten, preiswert?). My main system right now has been built up over time. Half of it is hand-me-down (von einer anderen Person weitergegeben?) or from recycled.

P.S. Guten Tag Herr Kobold, war ich in der US-Armee. Ich verbrachte 2 Jahre in Nürnberg.

I'm doing this one the cheep. Got 4 cards from the local used computer shop. Replacing the RL that's in there now.

Only PCI slots in there or also PCIe slots in there.

1. D-Link DFE-530TX+

This is a PCI card

2)  Broadcom BCM95721A211

And this is a PCIe card!!!

3. linksys lne100tx

PCI

4. TRENDne teg-pcitxr

PCI

Would you please so friendly and tell us what kind of mainboard you own? Or the vendor and model name
please would help us more to find a nice replacement for you. There are many ~$6 - $20 NICs on the market
that are able to shoot really cheap over eBay. And yes there are also Intel based! But we need to know what
kind of bus system is needed! PCI or PCIe?

I know none of these are Good Intel NIC, but I'm hoping that there's something better in this lot.

Intel PRO/1000 GT PWLA8391GTBLK Desktop Adapter Gbit LAN Netzwerkkarte NIC PCI PCI card for 7.99 €
HP Intel Gigabit CT Desktop NIC - FH969AA - 398754-001 - 490367-001- LOW Format PCIe card for 19 €

And telling me to go buy the right thing is not going to help. I don't have the [$30? $40?] to spend on a better NIC.

Do you mean for each or for all 4 cards together?
4 x Intel Desktop GT 1000 PCI adapter = 24 € here in Germany

Winner is #2

I can't fine much info on the BCM95721A211, do you think it will handle:

hardware checksum offload?
hardware TCP segmentation offload?
hardware large receive offload?

Or should I keep those checked?