> I have been shopping around to purchase 60 NIC cards. There seems to be a
> broad range in prices between $8 to $100 for PCI bus master NIC cards.
> What type of performance differences would I see in using say a $10 bus
> master Generic NIC (10/100) card instead of a say $50 to $100 3COM
> (10/100) NIC. Is there any real justification for purchasing the more
> expensive cards for creating a LINUX cluster
>
It all depends. the cheep cards tend to be a lot more 'dumb'. from what
I know, there drivers are more CPU intensive and they tend to generate
more interupts for a given amount of data transfer.
As far as the expensive NICs go, I would suggest you to stay away from
3com cards. I have found from expearance that they fail quite often. not
to say that 3com wont ship you new cards to replace them, but do you realy
want to mess with them. From my expearance (the past 1.5 years) about 25%
of all 3com NICs come from the box are bad. Personaly, I use Intel
NICs. They are similar in price to the 3coms, and similar in performance.
This is just my expearance, I have known others that sware by 3com, but I
will never buy one again.
Cris Wade
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