Recommended PCI gigabit ethernet card? OT: PC Gigabit Through put Question

[Flaherty, Patrick]

I'm not the best with these bit/byte problems so I might be wrong,
but.....

A PCI bus can pass 1056 bits a second (32 bit, 33 mhz)
tcp/ip over head is somewhere around %20 (1056 * .8 = 844.8)

What can you reasonably expect a pci gigabit card to give you for
through put? 

PCI Buses are generally shared (save high end server boards) right? 

On top of that, if hdparm says timed disk writes are around 40MB, what
could you see for sustained download speeds? Maybe a static cached
webpage could saturate a gig connection, sustained 5 gig http download
couldn't right?

Anyone have real world answers for that stuff?

Patrick


________________________________

From: gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org
[mailto:gnhlug-discuss-bounces at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Tom Buskey
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 12:36 PM
To: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
Subject: Recommended PCI gigabit ethernet card?


I have a cheap gigabit nic ($20) in my system and suspect it is slowing
down throughput so I'd like to upgrade it.
I did the google linux thing.  Half were error reports, half were from <
2004, half were sales "reviews", etc (yeah, that > 100%).  The Linux
HOWTOs are 2004 and earlier so there's barely a mention of gigabit
networking. 

It needs to be PCI
I'm running Fedora with Fedora kernels and don't want to compile
drivers.

What do people use, see as fast/compatible?