help me choose a NIC please

hi,

which brand of NIC should i get realtek, smc or netcomm? its for an old computer so I don't want a card that uses the cpu. I am getting it from this store: http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf

If u check out the link u know im getting one of the cheap ones that cost $8 or $13 and the store doesn't provide much info on those NIC.

I've had good luck with Realtek gigabit NICs (8169) and Intel 10/100 and wireless NICs. I would imagine that since you have an old computer, a gigabit NIC would be pretty inappropriate, so I'd think of a Realtek 8119/8129/8139 10/100 NIC or an Intel 10/100 NIC would do you well.

CPU utilization seems to be tied directly to the throughput rate of the data and not necessarily the NIC chipset type, or at least it is in my computers. My old 2.2 GHz Pentium 4-M laptop with a Realtek RTL-8169 gigabit PCMCIA NIC uses maybe 30% of its CPU power to push its maximum speed of about 300 Mbps through the network (router doesn't do jumbo frames.) My Athlon 64 X2 desktop also at 2.2 GHz has a PCI NIC with the same Realtek chipset as well as a built-in NVIDIA Nforce4 gigabit chip. Both use about 10-11% of one core's time when talking to the laptop at that 300 Mbps speed.

So for you I'd expect that a 100 Mbps NIC would work fine and any decent would use up about the same CPU time.

older model intels are good. realtek has cheap chips from what i heard. the intel cards are well supported even under unix/bsd/linux and cough cough windoze.