NIC Comparisons

T

Tau

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
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196
Just curious if anyone has any hard comparisons between Marvell, Realtek, and Intel NICs. I am hitting a bottleneck on a network and I am pretty sure its either NICs, or switch related. Moving files (large sequential read/writes) between two machines I am capping out around 60MB/s over full gigabit.

Test machines are both Quadcores with 8Gb ram, one running Vista SP2, the other OpenSolaris with CIFS

The HDDs in both boxes are not the issue, the drives in the Opensolaris box are capable of 600+MB/s, and the drives in the Vista machine are Raid0 capable of 100+MB/s so the bottleneck has to be the NICs, or switch.

I have gone ahead and orderd a 48 port Procurve :D (needed the upgrade anyways) So when that comes in the switch will be eliminated as the bottlneck.

NICs in both boxes are Marvell Yukons (cant remember the exact model) all cabling is short runs of Cat5e thats isolated from all power (no interferance)

My question is will the Intels make a noticable diffrence for me? And help me get wire speed on the network? Ideally i want wirespeed or atleast 100MB/s all day. I am just on the fence with the $60/port Intel NICs.
 
Marvell's are decent NIC's, at least in Windows. I don't know how their *nix drivers are. I'd place them above Realtek but below Intel.
 
Can you toss a crossover cable between them for testing purposes? That'll let you get the switch out of the equation now.
 
InvisiBill said:
Can you toss a crossover cable between them for testing purposes? That'll let you get the switch out of the equation now.
Click to expand...

No need to, part of the gigabit standard is auto MDI-X....so crossover cables have gone the way of the floppy drive...pretty much extinct. As long as at least 1 of the 2 computers you're direct connecting has a gigabit NIC..you don't need crossover cables.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
No need to, part of the gigabit standard is auto MDI-X....so crossover cables have gone the way of the floppy drive...pretty much extinct. As long as at least 1 of the 2 computers you're direct connecting has a gigabit NIC..you don't need crossover cables.
Click to expand...

Stonecat beat me to it >.> I should have the Procurve in hand this week.
 
Marvell are 'okay' but I'd place them in the same tier as Broadcom and notch or two below Intel. If you are looking to push your array and hit the upper end, I would go with Intel every time. Do I have any hard proof? No. But I've seen it proven time and time again in the field.
 
The hell with it, whats another $500 in NICs ;)

I will post some comparisons when they get here.
 
FWIW: My network maxes out around 100-102MB/s in Windows 7 to WHS in Hyper-V transfers (Dell 27xx switches in between) using Intel Pro/1000 PT and newer NICs.

My one Marvell NIC machine does about 75-80MB/s.

Realtek = stars align perfectly and a small head start to get to 75MB/s sustained on a multi-GB read/write.
 
pjkenned said:
FWIW: My network maxes out around 100-102MB/s in Windows 7 to WHS in Hyper-V transfers (Dell 27xx switches in between) using Intel Pro/1000 PT and newer NICs.

My one Marvell NIC machine does about 75-80MB/s.

Realtek = stars align perfectly and a small head start to get to 75MB/s sustained on a multi-GB read/write.
Click to expand...

Soundson par with my results... I have Marvells in both boxes i was testing with so that coud equate for my lower performance. Im going to order a quadport Intel Pro/1000PT for the fileserver and a dual port for my primary work station. Will see how that goes.
 
I have two Pro/1000 Quad PT's in my main server (along with two onboard Intel NICs) and a dual in my big screen area workstation with multiple SSD's.

Which one did you get (LP or full height)? I would suggest getting the LP ones just in case you want to stick them in a 2U later on. I have two full height ones just because they were cheaper at the time and I know they will be housed in 4U's for the foreseeable future.
 
pjkenned said:
I have two Pro/1000 Quad PT's in my main server (along with two onboard Intel NICs) and a dual in my big screen area workstation with multiple SSD's.

Which one did you get (LP or full height)? I would suggest getting the LP ones just in case you want to stick them in a 2U later on. I have two full height ones just because they were cheaper at the time and I know they will be housed in 4U's for the foreseeable future.
Click to expand...

I plan to pickup a full height quad port for the file server... since it will always be in a 4U chasis. and the dual ports were going to be LP :) Looks like we think alike.

Now assuming i can get wire speed over cifs/nfs, and iSCSI with this new setup i will be going ahead and be building a little SAN box and move my servers over to a VM cluster.

Fingers crossed :)
 
I've found that even some of the lower end NICs still perform rather well. I've gotten my quad Marvell NIC team to do 425mb/s on my file server. Don't know if that is as high as it goes, but it certainly isn't anything to complain about.
 
Realtek = lowest of the low.

Marvell is decent
Broadcom is good - server grade ones
intels are true hardware NIC's.
 
Yeah, teaming on my Asus P6T6 sucks thanks to the Realtek NICs. Kinda sad that pretty much all modern high end boards (outside of some Supermicro and server boards) come with that. I guess most people don't really notice the difference.
 
Blue Fox said:
I've found that even some of the lower end NICs still perform rather well. I've gotten my quad Marvell NIC team to do 425mb/s on my file server. Don't know if that is as high as it goes, but it certainly isn't anything to complain about.
Click to expand...

hmmm what was that setup like, and with jumbo frames?


Blue Fox said:
Yeah, teaming on my Asus P6T6 sucks thanks to the Realtek NICs. Kinda sad that pretty much all modern high end boards (outside of some Supermicro and server boards) come with that. I guess most people don't really notice the difference.
Click to expand...


I am going to wait untill i get the procurve here before i jump on the Intels for my workstations, though I still plan to put one in the fileserver.
 
Tau said:
hmmm what was that setup like, and with jumbo frames?
Click to expand...
Asus P5BV-C/4L with a Q6600, 4gb of ECC RAM, and Areca 1680i with 20 x 2TB Hitachi drives in RAID 6. Serving a bunch of systems all connected to an HP 1800-24g. Jumbo frames are not enabled.
 
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