Buying Advice for Standalone NIC?

[iRobie]

My onboard NIC started giving me problems. I tried everything I could to fix it, nothing helped. (very odd problems, not just that it died.) I stuck another card in my machine, voila! Problems solved. That card has problems of it's own - on sleep it'll randomly die. It's a cheap RTL8169, the card's always had that problem.

Anyway, I'm looking for a compatible standalone NIC. Any recommendations?

• Rosewill RC-401-EX. Has a Marvel chipset. Reviews say it works OOB (10.6.7), but others say the chipset (88E8053?) has lion problems. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166015[/*:m:2mnkvxo1]
• Broadcom NetXtreme card (BCM5761). The iMacs/Mac Minis use a Broadcom NetXtreme chip. But again, others are having a few problems, like here. http://www.amazon.com/Broadcom-Netxtreme-Gigabit-Ethernet-Pcie/dp/B001LXK28U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317739584&sr=8-1[/*:m:2mnkvxo1]
• A realtek card to use Lnx2Mac's driver with? Which one? An amazon link would be greatly appreciated![/*:m:2mnkvxo1]

Thanks!

 

[Huberer]

I'm using an Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter.

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-EXPI9301CTB ... 564&sr=8-2

Thisone works oob (even during install) under SL and Lion. You also can find a thread here in the forum. I just can recommend it.

 

[OldFred]

I went for the Netgear card, see below. Plug and play.

 

[iRobie]

Thanks! I see conflicting reports about both those cards too. Guess nothing will work 100% of the time for 100% of the people.

 

[Lnx2Mac]

iRobie,
Have you tried my RTL81xx v0.0.90 ? (Download from my blog, not MultiBeast)

 

[tsukaima]

I went for the Netgear card, see below. Plug and play.

Really? The netgear GA311 REV.A1 with TL8169S chip? Doesn't work in Lion...

And yes, i've tried the Lnx2Mac driver from Lnx2Mac's blog as well. Did not work. Nothing works, it's like the card isn't even there. I'm stuck using an old 8139D that dies any time I try to run a t*****t or transfer large files over the network.

EDIT: EDIT::
Finally got the 8169 working using this:
http://www.kexts.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1095

but it was not plug and play in Lion. I tried a LOT of supposed fixes for it before that one that finally worked...

I would still like to know if there are any standalone NICs that are truly vanilla and not likely to be removed on the next update...

 

[iRobie]

Lnx2Mac--

I did try your latest driver. That's when the problems started I don't think the new driver caused the WOL problem I was seeing, because I did several clean installs and the problem never went away (using both 0.6.3 and .9 drivers). Plus, it's just odd that Windows would solve the problem for one reboot...

tsukaima--

I'm a pretty demanding client for NICs, and let me tell you the RC-401-EX is great! I went with that because (afaik) it's the same card as the Presto Gigabit Pro PCIe, which advertises Snow Leopard compatibility. The wake up speed is incredibly fast compared to the built on chip.

Completely vanilla. No kext loading at all.

There's two things I do to push my NIC cards:
1. I store my music & photos on an SMB share. If the NIC card doesn't wake up fast enough, OSX will drop the connection to the SMB share and I'm hosed. Or if I use the Mac as an alarm clock, iTunes will often start before the music is connected, and I sleep in. This card does not have that problem.

2. I use Logmein. With the built on Realtek (when WOL was working), it'd take 30-60 seconds between waking the computer and being able to remotely use it. Now it's 5-10 seconds.

I'm not sure how v0.0.90 of Lnx2Mac's driver compares with this card because I wasn't able to get WOL working. (Or, I got distracted by other things). But I can tell you that the Rosewill card was worth the money.