NETGEAR GA311 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Adapter
See it at Amazon.com for $16.99Average Customer Rating
(3.5 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(1 out of 5)PCI Gigabit cards aren't going to be Gigabit speed on the PCI bus
The PCI bus does not have the bandwidth to get you Gigabit speed. You will be very lucky if you can get 300 megabit speeds on a PCI gigabit card, even with jumbo frames.
Your motherboard has two PCI busses, and sometimes has three. Depending on the chipset and the manufacturer, the internal devices like the keyboard/mouse/floppy, internal network, USB, Firewire, and more, will be on one bus or the other bus and often both busses. You will have to run SiSoft Sandra or pcitweak to figure out which of the devices are on which bus and experiment with which slot to plug this card into so the card can get all the PCI bandwidth it can get, but that will not be close to gigabit speed, either. Best case on 33 MHz PCI is 300 megabit.
Even if you can find which PCI bus has the fewest bandwidth-consuming devices on it, the 33 MHz PCI busses in all consumer PCs cannot handle the bandwidth of this (or any) gigabit card, anyway. If you want true gigabit speed get a motherboard that has built-in gigabit or get a motherboard with 66 MHz PCI, PCI-X (not PCI Express), 64-bit PCI, or similar, but you're going to pay lots of money for that.
Worse yet that built-in Gigabit interface might still be on a 33 MHz PCI bus and always sharing bandwith, giving you less than 300 megabit speed. It probably shares with other devices so you have to do your homework.
(5 out of 5)Supported by Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger & Tiger Server
Besides being available at an excellent price, the Netgear GA311 Gigabit Ethernet card is supported natively by Mac OS X 10.4 and later and by Mac OS X Server 10.4 and later.
Even though the product mentions no support for either OS, the card will work without the need for any third party driver.
--Gerrit DeWitt
Apple Certified System Administrator
(3 out of 5)This card works, but I'm going to return it
I bought this card for a home gigabit network, this one was going in an XP PC. I am planning to return it for 3 reasons:
- It does not have Microsoft certified drivers. That means if it conflicts with your system and causes crashes, that's your problem (and it's more likely than with certified drivers). Netgear is still selling this card, today in early Sept 2005, but the last drivers are from late 2003. There's no excuse for a large company's products to claim XP compatability these days and not have certified drivers.
- This NIC is not "native gigabit". For whatever reason, it does not run in gigabit mode until drivers are loaded. I'm used to NICs that are gigabit when they power up, well before any system software is running. Why this one doesn't, I'm not sure. That's connected to a Netgear gigabit switch.
- Unlike many NICs, it is not supported out of the box by Windows XP.
So back it goes... I'd suggest looking at the more reputable vendor like Linksys.
(4 out of 5)There are other limitations to worry about aside from PCI
I rated it 3 stars because it does what it is supposed to do in windows. Also, Kriston was not entirely correct is his review... a PCI bus at 33MHz can transfer 133MBps (that's megabytes per second), which is yes, best case scenario. To get Mbps (megabits per second) you multiply that by eight... giving you just over 1Gbps (gigabit, not gigabyte). It real life, you won't get that much throughput, but probably not entirely because of shared bus I/O. Most hard disks cannot transfer 1Gbps sustained, which is 125MBps...(megabytes). In my experience with this card running in PCI mode, I can transfer as fast as my disk can output. PCI Xpress is better, but you'll need solid state memory to transfer that fast.
(1 out of 5)Fails on Win2K Server, web has no drivers & incomplete info
Summary: The GA311 card does not function with Windows 2000 even though Netgear's utility says it does. Netgear web info is extremely sparse: no drivers, no Windows compatibility info, nothing available at all that isn't already on the provided CD. With no functional drivers and no help on their web site, I recommend NOT buying Netgear GA311 adapters.
I installed GA311 cards on 3 different Win2K Adv Servers (SP4) and while the Netgear utility reports the cards fully functional, they fail to send or receive data on both existing 10/100 and 10/100/1000 LANs. Localhost loopback tests work (i.e. IP 127.0.0.1), but the GA311's can't communicate through their network jacks at all. I even used a LAN sniffer to confirm that the GA311's are NOT transmitting data even though the Netgear utility says they ARE sending data.
On the Netgear site, there are no drivers, only 2 pdf docs (included on the CD), and the only download is the initial firmware release which is totally useless because there is no other firmware to install (the only reason why you'd want the initial releae). On Netgear's operating system compatibility page, http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n101252.asp, the section for the GA311 is totally blank, indicating that the company's support people don't even have any info on their own product.
I've never had a problem with Netgear products and use them frequently. However, the GA311 card is a total bomb regarding Windows 2000. With a severe lack of support on the Netgear web site, I'd be leery of buying this card.
Personal note: I build & maintain Windows networks for a living. In 20 years, I've never seen a commercial network product with such incomplete company support. I am very surprised as the many other Netgear products I've installed have worked flawlessly.