6 Port Intel Gigabit NIC - $115

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Disclosing... up front, these appear from the picture to be Intel 82546GB based, which means 2003 era PCI-X cards with a PCIe bridge...

Dell/HotLava 6-port Intel Gigabit PCIe NIC $115 BIN.

Silicoms got more expensive and saw this one. Again, not sure if this is well supported at this point and is an older chip. The beloved 82574L is a 2008 release by comparison.
 

Aluminum

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Sep 7, 2012
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Disclosing... up front, these appear from the picture to be Intel 82546GB based, which means 2003 era PCI-X cards with a PCIe bridge...

Dell/HotLava 6-port Intel Gigabit PCIe NIC $115 BIN.

Silicoms got more expensive and saw this one. Again, not sure if this is well supported at this point and is an older chip. The beloved 82574L is a 2008 release by comparison.
Are you shoulder surfing me or something? :)

BTW the 82574L isn't the usual chip in most server pull cards, its the budget chip used mostly on motherboards or non server cards with less offload features and no ECC on the data path. They've been changing to 82579V (LM for v-pro), seem to hear more end user problems about these lately.

I watched some silicom 6 port pci express this week, more than one didn't sell with a $99 min bid and 125 buyout. (PEG6i should be 3x 82571) I was considering but already have enough for now, it would be excellent for a small ITX router box.

The most common dual port ($30 dell/hp/etc pulls) are 82571 based, a better chip for our purposes. A fair number of quad cards have a pair of these, along with some 82575/6 (usually sold as EB or VT)

Sometimes you can get i340 or even i350 quad cards under $150, if you plan to do a lot of VM stuff on newer hardware these are nice.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Very interesting. Great update. The 82574L's are just great because they are supported in everything. Makes life easy from a HCL standpoint. They are also super stable. I think the i210 NICs are the successors though.