Netgear FA-310TX 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet PCI Card
by Netgear
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Our Price: $36.99 Availability: Usually ships in 2-3 business days Buy Used: from $1.98 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Netgear FA-310TX 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet PCI Card
Customer Review: Works Well With Red Hat Linux, Windows 9x
Summary: 5 Stars
I use this card for my home network, and it has never given me trouble. I reccomend it for people wanting to quickly get a home network up and running. Provided you pay attention to the network configuration requirements for your particular OS, this card is most unlikely to give you trouble. If you think you have a card problem carefully recheck your config work a few times first before blaming the card. This card works great in Red Hat Linux AND Windows. It is the only Netgear card certified for Red Hat Linux 7. As a matter of fact I'm ordering a 4th FA-310TX card to replace a Linksys card right now. I'm involved in Linux and am presently converting an Emachines box to a 100% Red Hat Linux 7 machine. I ran into trouble with the Linksys FastEthernet 10/100 (Version 2) card in this box. It turns out Red Hat 7 can see that card, but not the Linksys chip, so I need to replace it. End of my use of Linksys cards (but they work just great in Windows networks and I have a complete Linksys-based network running for a client as well.) I'll probably stick to Netgear in the future.
Customer Review: Great performance, good variety of platforms supported
Summary: 4 Stars
This is Bay Networks (Netgear is their consumer line) implementation of the venerable DEC "Tulip" PCI ethernet chipset. There are many manufacturers of 10/100 cards that use Tulip, so you can go by price since they are all pretty much the same. That's what makes this card good -- it's one of the lower priced cards from a respected industry vendor.Tulip cards are known for their low CPU utilization, high throughput and their ability to run on a variety of platforms. I have personally used this card with great success on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris x86, Windows 95, 98, and NT.
I did dock one star however, and that's because their have been some minor problems with the drivers included on the driver diskettes. Those seem to have been fixed with subsequent releases, and the card itself wasn't to blame. If you do have problems, and you can use one of the other Tulip drivers included with your OS, such as the Digital DE500. In fact, Windows may autodetect it as an "Intel 21140 Fast Ethernet" or some such.
Customer Review: Iffy Quality & Stability. Skip this one!
Summary: 2 Stars
I work in Cable Modem operations. We have some customers who buy cheap, and often problematic NIC's, ony to face hours of endless troubleshooting on NIC issues. The NetGear FA-310 is one of their biggest problems. Made of flimsy greenboard and "? " type Chinese components, NetGear's crusade of inexpensive NIC's has made a joke of consistentcy. The price may be attractive, yet you would be hard-pressed to find any company who would commit to using NetGear NIC's throughout their operation: Simply because the service and quality is inconsistent. NetGear's customer support is short of laughable, as well.You get what you pay for. From my point of view, I would avoid NetGear, Linksys, or any other "Off-Brand" NIC and consider looking for one more dependable. You may pay a little more for a 3Com, Intel, and SMC, but they are worth the price. They offer the consistency and stability every NIC user should demand - Not just a discount price.
Customer Review: Serious issues with later revs
Summary: 2 Stars
These used to be some of the best cards to have, back when they were based on the REAL Digital Tulip chip. However, some years ago the Tulip went out of production and Netgear switched to an _almost_ compatible clone chip.The LiteOn PNIC chip that the current cards use has a poor reputation (from what I've read) in the development community. I personally have used dozens of these cards over the past two years and have seen almost every manner of failure. We've had cards that can't auto-neg, ones that never seem to work, and worst of all, cards that will work for weeks and then die without warning. From what I've seen, these things never get decent performance, especially with multiple cards in a system.
I have used the FA310TX with Windows 95,98,NT,2k, Linux 2.2-2.4, and Free/OpenBSD. Across every OS and hardware platform I've tried I've seen the same problems, so it's definately not driver or configuration issues.
Customer Review: Great Value and Works Flawlessly with win 95/98
Summary: 5 Stars
I have bought over 5 of these for home and office use. They work flawlessy and for the price you cannot beat the functionality. I was running Windows 95 or Windows 98 on all the computers. Setup was a snap. Just pop in the card to an empty slot. Then install the drivers from the floppy disk that comes in the package. Worked flawlessly everytime. I had no problems hooking up the ethernet card to a Linksys DSL/Cable Router, Netgear ethernet hubs, or a college dorm ethernet connection. Get this card and you will get the convenience of file and print sharing when used in conjunction with some sort of hub and windows network neighborhood. Anyone with little to no computer expertise can do this just by following the instructions. It may be a little difficult if you are scared of computers, but it can still be done. Just follow the pictures that come on the step by step setup foldout.