Cheapo 4-Port RJ-45 Nic!

I'm sure I'm not the only one that looks at the prices for internal nics and scoff. 199 for the CHEAPEST, startech quad nic.

Here's a cheap solution: RouterBoard.com : RB44Ge. 10/100/1000T. Here's the best part : 99 Bucks. Yeah, it's awesome.

From what i've read of people that used these board in the past, apparently they perform better: Dual/Quad NIC - DaemonForums

It has a low-profile bracket. I haven't found a full-sized bracket, yet. But StarTech didn't have a full-size bracket either.

Yeah, I'm excited, it's cheap and seems to be good. Figured someone might find this useful in building a cheaper lab. 100 bucks is still 100 bucks.

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Comments

DevilWAH

for a lab maybe but I would steer well clear of cheap nic's for production.

good quality nic's will do all processing on card so not off load to the CPU as the cheaper ones will, and will have buffers and cache that allow them to run at 100% continually, unlike there cheap collusion that can only burst to there claimed speed.

I use to run a lot of deep packet inspection and this soon sorts out the men from the boys. Cheap cards would lock up after a time under heavy loads and the CPU would be hammered. Top end cards would purr along for months with out issue and keep the CPU freee for other things.

Don't get me wrong I use cheap card in my test equipment unless i have reason not to. But just thought I would share my finding about them in the live environment. May be for low uterlised servers but i would advice steering clear of them for any heavy weight jobs.

inscom.brigade

if you are handy with some basic tools there is a card that the original engineer did not complete. It only needs 1 small notch cut in it. It is marked just not cut. If you do full research about this card you will see that it's original design was intended for a PC. Lots of info about it on page 5 in ccnp section. silicom;

http://www.techexams.net/forums/ccnp/81593-silicom-pxg6i-hex-6-port-pci-pci-x-adapter.html

Those cards cost as little as $25.00 on ebay; if you run XP 64bit or server2003, 2008, not r2, the card can bundle ports like etherchannel, and create vlans.