[CS-FSLUG] Why I've NEVER LIKED nor will use Asus!!

[Josiah Ritchie]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 00:43, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:05, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
> > they worked a far sight better on our network than the ne2000 ones we
> > replaced.
> 
> Now there's an achievement.</sarcasm> (-:
> 
> You notice the difference when the load goes up. If you're pushing 8 or 
> 9 megabytes a second out of that little RJ-45, your CPU useage will be 
> *much* higher for an AUD$5 RTL-8139C than for an AUD$12 Tulip, NatSemi, 
> ViaRhine or similar, which will in turn be a little higher than an 
> AUD$45 EtherExpress Pro100.
> 
> If you're driving a dozen thin clients or backing up data by the tonne 
> over a LAN, having a real network card makes an amazing difference. If 
> it's plugged into an ADSL router instead, or driving a printer over a 
> crossover cable, you'll probably not notice.
> 
> If you're prepared to spend circa $AUD1500 on _good_ PCI64 network 
> cards, you can in some circumstances do a network-to-network copy with 
> essentially zero CPU involvement, and you can trivially redline your 
> gigabit LAN and hard disks at the same time without smashing your CPU 
> into the floor under the load of interrupts and housekeeping.

Oh, land. Yeah, if we're using the network heavily on a machine, we
default to something that costs more like a 3Com NIC. I wouldn't think
once about putting one in a server.:-) We only use them in workstations.

I hadn't heard the detail you mention about CPU usage though. Thanks for
tossing that in. That last paragraph was especially insightful.

Thanks,
JSR/