Customer Reviews

NETGEAR GA311 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Adapter

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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

I rated it 4 stars because it does what it is supposed to do in windows. Also, a past reviewer was not entirely correct is his review... a PCI bus at 33MHz can transfer 133MBps (that's megabytes per second). To get Mbps (megabits per second) you multiply that by eight... giving you just over 1Gbps (gigabit, not gigabyte). This is a card designed to do just that.

In real life, you won't get that much throughput, because of shared bus I/O and other limitations. On the flip side, most home systems won't require this much bandwidth, even for file copies. Most hard disks cannot transfer 1Gbps sustained, which is 125MBps...(megabytes), unless you have newer SATA drives on both ends, you might get close. In my experience with this card running in PCI mode, I can transfer as fast as my disk can output, including RAID striped disks.

I picked this up after having some trouble with a few other network cards, while trying to get both kgdb support in Linux, and gigabit ethernet networking at the same time.

This card works perfectly with Linux, at least for the Redhat-based distros I've been dealing with lately. If you're compiling your network drivers into the kernel (not as kernel modules), for kernel 2.6.18 and later, just choose "Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet support" in the kernel configuration and it will work.

I bought 9 of these cards at auction. All have been installed on XP machines. I only had one recent problem. My home XP computer could not log into my DGL-4100 router with the factory 2003 driver. I downloaded the latest driver and diagnostic utility from the Realtek website today and presto...I can now log into my router. Thanks to all previous posters. This issue has been nagging me for months.
P.S. The new drivers say they support Win 2000 and Server 2003.
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=4&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true

I also got the Blue Screen crash with Win2K Server, but was able to find a newer driver from the link below. The newer driver (dated 2005Mar04 versus a 2003 version from Netgear's website) seems to have support for configuring the Jumbo Frame size from 3KB to 7KB. Unfortunately I got the NETGEAR GS608 8 port switch which does not support Jumbo Frames. Throughput is still less than 100Mbps with peaks at under 200Mbps. On big file transfers and Jumbo Frame the throughput should be better, although I can't test it out for now. The low performance is probably due to context switching for CPU between kernal and user mode and the none-zero copy of buffers. Hay, for the price of about $12 a NIC it beats a regular 10/100BaseTx card.

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?software=True&refdesign=True&spec=True&other=True&series=2003072

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.

Upgraded my home file/web setup to GigE with three of these and an accompanying Netgear router. Works without any hitches. Linux support is great. Just load r8169.

This is a perfect fit for an older PCI slot that was the low power kind. Not all PCI cards provide gigabit ethernet at the 3.3 volt specification, this one works for both voltages. Easy to install and WIN XP had no problem finding and configuring the card on one machine, the other (identical machine) showed the Realtek chipset as the card's name and didn't have the same features as the first machine did (it saw the card correctly as the Netgear GA311). The Realtek configuration had more options to choose from that the Netgear options but I couldn't get the computer to see the card as a Realtek card. Gave up trying and ended up setting them both to Netgear cards in case there was a conflict. Have an SMC wireless router and they work great together.

Vendor delivered on time and product was as expected. Would purchase from them again.

First I must mention that the package or manual does not say this card supports Linux, but it's using Realtek 8169 chipset which driver 'r8169' is already in kernel 2.4 or 2.6, I downloaded the latest 'r1000' and still couldn't get anything higher than 80Mbps under kernel 2.4.20. Some users reported on newsgroup for this known performance issue on Linux, and one was able to crank it up to 240Mbps running a 3.2GHz AMD system. Since this card is not meant to support Linux and I haven't tried it on Windows I would give it a 2 stars to be fair.

My on-board NIC was fried by a lightning during a thunderstorm, so I went out looking for a new NIC. I would have preferred 3Com's gigabit cards to NetGear's, but since I needed the card ASAP I rolled with NetGear.

Installation on XP is not complicated but not trivial either. The driver that they provide is not signed by Microsoft, so it may or may not be fully compatible with the system (for all who care, the Blue Screen of Death in Win2K and later versions is almost always due to faulty device drivers).

Right off the bat the card performed very well, giving me transfer speeds higher than what I previously had. The card can detect whether the network supports full duplex and turn this feature on, or alternatively it works in half duplex mode.

I will report any problems as an addendum to this review. Until then assume that the card works as expected.