# Please help me find a PCI Gigabit network card (out-of-box)

## jmituzas

What is the best PCI giga-bit nic apapter that I can get?

It is an old Dell Ominplex  machine a PIII (slot) 

with 256 MB ram

I am looking to turn this old dell into a router and want 5 working out of box nics. 

Please help me find these.

Thanks in advance,

Joe

----------

## rufnut

Any pci gigabit network card will work.

The problem you most likely will have is that you are running a P3 

and it may slow it down the network a lot.

You have a few options: 

1:single NIC's << for this you will need 5 free pci slots

early r8169 drivers gave me 300 mbit/sec througput. 

(3 years ago)

later r8169 drivers gave me 550+ mbit/sec

The above would be cheapest at approx $10 per card for cheap realtek cards

with r8169 drivers, I havent benched one for a while they may be even 

faster now?

I think the above with 5 cards would slow the routing down as they are 

all talking on the pci bus, and being a P3 I doubt it will  be PCI 2.3 spec.

So avoid the above if you can!

2:Multiple NIC cards

These can be expensive.

approx 750-950 mbits/sec depending on setup and bus used

you can get 4 gang gigabit pci-x cards that may work in your P3 pci slot.

That would work provided they have routing intelligence on the card.

I imagine that pci-x ones would.

I use the odd pci-x card in a pci slot and still found it better in early days than cheap cards.

Nowadays my onboard NIC's are just as quick even quicker at about 900 mbit/sec

(that was late model machines though)

Intel or Broadcom cards worked well 750 mbit/sec

I pick up some of this stuff at used computer markets and sheesh its well built.

Also bear in mind pci-x is different from pci-e

Looking at this you can get cheap 4 port gigabit routers for approx $50 or even less.

They would chew less power than your P3 but you may not have the configurability.

Hope I havent confused you 

 :Smile: 

----------

## sparc

What exactly do you mean "out of the box"? Gentoo is not something you can just go and install so please elaborate... As far as I know, since many many kernel versions now, all gigabit nics simply work. It is probably the less complicated circuit out there. Are you going to build your own kernel? In any case your best option for compatibility questions is to just take a look at the help of each of the kernel supported cards.

If your question however is targeted on performance issues I think this is the wrong forum. Better find a sysadmin community.

----------

## John R. Graham

Most Gentoo-based routers are constructed as residential gateways routing a WAN connection that is much, much slower than a 1Gb/s.  Unless you're truly routing four different networks (as opposed to network segments), a better setup would be two garden variety 100BaseT NICs (go GigE if you want but your WAN connection speed probably doesn't warrant it) and a gigabit switch for the downstream routing.

- John

----------

## NeddySeagoon

jmituzas,

A 32bit 33MHz PCI bus cannot keep a single 1Gbit NIC busy, never mind 5.

Also as a router, data has to pass over the PCI bus twice, so you get less than half the bandwidth you are expecting.

Realtek 8169 based cards are good value for money.

Oh so you can do your own bandwidth calculations, your PCI bus will max out about 100Mbtye/sec.

That's for everything on that bus. The theoretical max is 133Mbyte/sec but there is some overhead that stops you achieving that.

----------

## Cyker

I think it might struggle if you actually want to get gigabit speeds on that system. The IRQ load alone will probably use up most of the processing time!  :Razz: 

The Realtek cards are cheap but garbage; Even on PCIe I've never gotten it above 60% utilization and they seem to generate far more IRQs than other cards I've used. They do work tho'.

Marvell cards perform better, but they are still buggy in Linux; The sky2 and skge drivers do not handle high-load situations very well with certain chipsets.

The Intel and Broadcom cards tend to perform better and have their own processors to reduce the CPU load, but they are more expensive. They also have multi-port cards which might help with the bus traffic a bit.

----------

## jmituzas

Thanks for all of your replies!!  javascript:emoticon(' :Smile: ')

Quickly had me change my mind to use this as a router / switch to 'sub-net' the network. Guess its time to put the old machine to death! 

And buy something with 3 pci-x slots for this project. Then I could get the dual-port cards. 

And have something with much faster bus speeds if I want to get the best out of those nics.

something more along the lines of a 1066. 

I will be building a custom kernel with this as well as hopefully be able to get something for a traffic shaping solution & QoS as well.  

so any of the pci-x cards will work?

was looking at 

STARTECH.COM ST1000SPEXDP PCIE ETHERNET CARD 

and 

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=INT-1G42ET&src=FR&pid=dc70c46eef02cd6c87bfaaa691d16a3c70747996800b013835bb3388f2ac0bd6

would these two cards work fine of course not on the old dell that I have proposed earlier but on something with a bus speed of at-least 1066?

Is there drivers avail that can be built from source?

Sorry but its been awhile since I have done anything 'gentoo-style'. Since most of my servers are either CentOS or Ubuntu. 

But I want the customization of Gentoo for this router. 

Thanks for the replies.

joe

----------

## John R. Graham

Note that PCI-X != PCIe.  PCI-X only occurred in server motherboards and was a relatively short-lived mainstream server technology.  PCIe is also sometimes called PCI-E.  PCIe peak data rate is 2Gb/s (ver 1.0) or 4Gb/s (ver 2.0) per lane; each PCIe card slot may support 1 to 16 lanes (the standard says up to 32 but this is extremely rare in implementation).  Cards can be designed to take advantage of the number of lanes that they need.

(Note that the speed figures quoted above take into account encoding overhead but not administrative overhead.  The actual throughput will be somewhat less.)

I still would be interested to know if you're actually routing a pipe that warrants GigE speeds.

- John

----------

## Cyker

Yeah; If you are only needing the router for broadband, e.g. ADSL or Cable, then you can still use the P3 for a router.

For instance, my server has a PCI 10/100 (3com 905b), two gigabit nics on HyperTransport (nVidia and Marvell sky2) and a Broadcom PCIe 1x gigabit nic.

The broadband goes into the 3com card and is NAT-routed out to the 3 gigabit NICs (Which are actually all bridged together). One is connected to a NAS, the other to my main machine and the last goes to a gigabit switch  :Smile: 

----------

## jmituzas

 *john_r_graham wrote:*   

> Note that PCI-X != PCIe.  PCI-X only occurred in server motherboards and was a relatively short-lived mainstream server technology.  PCIe is also sometimes called PCI-E.  PCIe peak data rate is 2Gb/s (ver 1.0) or 4Gb/s (ver 2.0) per lane; each PCIe card slot may support 1 to 16 lanes (the standard says up to 32 but this is extremely rare in implementation).  Cards can be designed to take advantage of the number of lanes that they need.
> 
> - John

 

Thanks for the correction!

[quote=Cyker]The broadband goes into the 3com card and is NAT-routed out to the 3 gigabit NICs (Which are actually all bridged together). One is connected to a NAS, the other to my main machine and the last goes to a gigabit switch.

-Cyker[/quote]

Similar to what I want, will have 1 (gateway) broadband connection, and 6 gigbit ports (3-dual-port) each to its own switch. Would like to subnet each port to a different ip class, 

example: 

(onboard) gateway: 10.30.0.1

port 1: 10.30.10.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 2: 10.30.20.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 3: 10.30.30.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 4: 10.30.40.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 5: 10.30.50.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 6: 10.30.60.1 ---> gigabit switch

something like that is what I am trying to achieve. This is possible correct?Last edited by jmituzas on Mon Mar 22, 2010 9:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

----------

## jmituzas

 *john_r_graham wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I still would be interested to know if you're actually routing a pipe that warrants GigE speeds.
> 
> - John

 

It would be nice, here at the office we have 2 dell iSCSI nas servers. They get amazing speed. Would be nice to get something close without the $45000 price tag.

----------

## John R. Graham

But do you really need to impose different routing rules for different network segments to access the NAS?  If not, then what you're talking about is overkill.  Today's switches perform simple routing between different ports and support multiple full-speed non-conflicting paths through the switch fabric.

- John

----------

## jmituzas

 *john_r_graham wrote:*   

> But do you really need to impose different routing rules for different network segments to access the NAS?  If not, then what you're talking about is overkill.  Today's switches perform simple routing between different ports and support multiple full-speed non-conflicting paths through the switch fabric.
> 
> - John

 

so what your telling me as if I were not to make the router a nas server i could simply do it this way:

port 1 10/100mb/s 10.30.10.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 2: 10/100mb/s 10.30.20.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 3: 10/100mb/s 10.30.30.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 4: 10/100mb/s 10.30.40.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 5: 10/100mb/s 10.30.50.1 ---> gigabit switch

port 6: 10/100mb/s 10.30.60.1 ---> gigabit switch 

that I could do on the pIII correct?

hmmmm maybe you could be helpful?

what I would like to accomplish here would be reason why i want to segment it like this is because:

 I would like to separate my voip traffic, from my server & local traffic and also segment my 2 off site locations.

With an added HTB for traffic shaping and iptables.

I chose gentoo because of customization. Though this is my first time ever attempting a router and firewall, I think I could make really good use out of it.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

jmituzas,

You could do that on the P3 but you could not get gigabit speeds as the PCI bus cannot provide the bandwidth

----------

## eccerr0r

Before people go rushing out to buy random 8169 cards, I own three 8169 cards, two of which have either failed or have become flaky.  I don't remember the brand of the good 8169 card anymore unfortunately.  This 8169 is in a K7 AthlonXP 2200+ K7S5A board, and struggles to get past 30MB/sec, and usually hovers around 20MB/sec as it handles the 4-disk RAID5 on the machine.  At least the network isn't the bottleneck anymore where it was with the onboard SiS ethernet.

I also have one onboard 8110 (8169 variant) that is somewhat flaky (sometimes does not work).  It's on a Gigabyte motherboard.

YMMV.

----------

## jmituzas

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> jmituzas,
> 
> You could do that on the P3 but you could not get gigabit speeds as the PCI bus cannot provide the bandwidth

 

Well I don't think I am getting gigabit speeds from comcast anyways, so this should do. I am simply going to use it as a router then go to a switch.

----------

## Cyker

 *jmituzas wrote:*   

> Well I don't think I am getting gigabit speeds from comcast anyways...

 

lolololol!  :Laughing: 

----------

