NIC died - Which 3rd party card to buy?

[DrunknMunky]

My P55A-UD3's NIC died recently and I am in the process of returning it to Gigabyte for a repair/replacement. However, I've been doing some reading and it seems the NIC's on these boards are prone to burning out.

So to save the trouble of it ever happening again once it is fixed & returned to me, I would like to use a 3rd party NIC instead. Trouble is which one do I buy?

I've read that the Netgear GA311 is plug and play with Leopard, but it seems it can be a hassle to get working on SL?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/60013

If it is possible to get working can someone please post a guide or talk me through the process. Otherwise, suggestions are welcome for a different brand/model.

Thanks

 

[DrunknMunky]

Well seeing as I had no replies I went ahead and bought the GA311 card anyway.

I'll post my results if/when I get it working.

 

[DrunknMunky]

Just an update..

I received feedback from the engineer at Gigabyte who told me there was no issue with the motherboard while he tested it. He sent pictures of it running both in the BIOS and Windows 7 with an active internet connection.

It wasn't until I already sent the motherboard away I read topics both here and over at InsanelyMac that drivers can conflict / need reloading on OSx86 builds. Before I had this issue I had very recently installed Windows 7 and was dual booting with my SL install. As I was using the proper drivers in Windows and the NIC was still reporting a general hardware failure, it didn't even cross my mind that the drivers from OS X could be conflicting with it.

I asked them to send the motherboard back and as soon as I booted up everything was back to normal, with full internet access. Even after switching between Win7/OS X and downloading quite a few GB's of data so far, there hasn't been one issue. The only thing that has changed was the engineer updated the BIOS from F6 to F8 while he had it and they had changed some of the BIOS settings from AHCI back to IDE.

I'm not sure if that fixed it or if reloading the optimized BIOS settings while I set things back up did the trick, but either way things are working again.

I'll test the Netgear GA311 card later this week and report back if it indeed works OOB. I'm pretty confident it will, but there's always that percent of unpredictability with OSx86

On another note I also purchased a WLAN adapter for an older iMac G5 I had without an Airport card installed. There really isn't a lot of choice out there for people with dead Airport cards or hackintoshers, but again Netgear have a solution with the WG111. There is drivers available from their website for OS X 10.3 and up for both revision 2 and 3 of the adapter. Hope this helps someone looking to buy one!

 

[MacMan]

Just an update..

I received feedback from the engineer at Gigabyte who told me there was no issue with the motherboard while he tested it. He sent pictures of it running both in the BIOS and Windows 7 with an active internet connection.

It wasn't until I already sent the motherboard away I read topics both here and over at InsanelyMac that drivers can conflict / need reloading on OSx86 builds. Before I had this issue I had very recently installed Windows 7 and was dual booting with my SL install. As I was using the proper drivers in Windows and the NIC was still reporting a general hardware failure, it didn't even cross my mind that the drivers from OS X could be conflicting with it.

I asked them to send the motherboard back and as soon as I booted up everything was back to normal, with full internet access. Even after switching between Win7/OS X and downloading quite a few GB's of data so far, there hasn't been one issue. The only thing that has changed was the engineer updated the BIOS from F6 to F8 while he had it and they had changed some of the BIOS settings from AHCI back to IDE.

I'm not sure if that fixed it or if reloading the optimized BIOS settings while I set things back up did the trick, but either way things are working again.

I'll test the Netgear GA311 card later this week and report back if it indeed works OOB. I'm pretty confident it will, but there's always that percent of unpredictability with OSx86

On another note I also purchased a WLAN adapter for an older iMac G5 I had without an Airport card installed. There really isn't a lot of choice out there for people with dead Airport cards or hackintoshers, but again Netgear have a solution with the WG111. There is drivers available from their website for OS X 10.3 and up for both revision 2 and 3 of the adapter. Hope this helps someone looking to buy one!

I also think that some of the Ethernet issues are due to the Open Source RealtekR1000SL driver.

Are you running in 32 or 64-bit mode? If 32-bit, try the official Realtek driver.

 

[DrunknMunky]

Tested the card this afternoon and it worked straight away. Sys Prefs popped up with an alert saying a new card was detected etc.

I'm using 64bit SL so unfortunately I can't use the official Realtek driver. For anyone else looking for it though...

http://www.realtek.com.tw/DOWNLOADS...d=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Sticking with my Gigabyte onboard ethernet for now. Will keep the GA311 as a spare just in case.

 

[Lnx2Mac]

Have you tried my beta driver http://bit.ly/RTL81xx ?