On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 09:06:28AM +1100, Donovan Baarda wrote: > On Tue, 2003-01-14 at 08:33, Jean-Francois Dive wrote: > > i agree, but not specially for the hardware quality of the Pro/X intel card > > serie, but for the quality of the driver which have been developed by intel > > and give out very good perf. The core issue is the driver and not the hardware > > in a lot of cases. > > This is a very important point. Crap hardware with good drivers is > better than good hardware with crap drivers. The more widespread a piece > of hardware is, the more people care/work on the drivers, the better the > drivers are.
I think I agree, to a point ... some hardware is so crappy that it can't be disguised by perfume from a great driver. For instance, the realtek drivers must do an excessive amount of copying due to weird alignment issues with the realtek chipset. > The crappy Realtek hardware works reliably for me... but admittedly I > haven't pushed it hard or cared about performance. I know at least one > person who abandoned an intel NIC for a Realtek because they couldn't > get the intel working (probably at the time it was a case of a new NIC > with no drivers yet, but still an issue). I have avoided Intel enet cards for 4+ years now because of driver issues. OTOH, I also avoid realtek cards after I had a few fall over while trying to keep up on a busy network ... -- Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] A young man wrote to Mozart and said: Q: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any suggestions as to how to get started?" A: "A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with some simple lieder and work your way up to a symphony." Q: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old." A: "But I never asked anybody how." -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]