Customer Reviews

Netgear FA-310TX 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet PCI Card

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

I have been using these little babies for the last couple of years...and they perform as well as 3COM 905's, fraction of the cost.

I'm a Systems/network Admin type--hardware, software,etc. I do most of it.

I have yet to run into problems I could peg on the card. I've run it under WinNT Server and Workstation 4.0, Win 2000 Pro, Windows 9x, and Linux. For a brief time, bad drivers were shipped with them, but Netgear corrected it.

These little babies are dual mode (10/100 speed) and Full Duplex (this is a good thing for you non-geeks out there).

The naysayers are blaming the wrong part of their PC with the criticisms I've read so far. I've run them in everything from Pentium Class TX motherboards up to PIII BX boards. No problems.

Buy it, you'll like it.

I would never recommend another network card... this card was perfectly detected by 2 verisons of Linux I have, as well as a copy of UNIX without any installation. The card is extremely reliable and my company has bought 20 without any problems, especially good for retail machines like COMPAQ's. PCI card requires no assigning IRQ's. Fast 100Mbps, and great support. Comes with a driver disk with any driver for any OS. Fully supported in Win2k as well... even better than the classic NE2000!

Others have written about poor manuals and shoddy components. This might be true. I'm not a beginner with network software or hardware but I'm hardly a pro either. I had zero problems installing this (manual seemed fine to me) and haven't had any problems using it since. BTW I use it to hook into my DSL connection. If it didn't work I'd just send it back (Amazon's always been great about this). And the price is just too hard to pass up.

The Netgear FA-310TX 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet PCI Card uses the Tulip chipset which is widely supported. Most Operating Systems have a driver which will support this card right out of the box. For that reason it is very effective in computers where you want a low cost solution for systems running non-Microsoft operating systems.

My only fault with the card is that is uses a flash ROM on the board. This ROM chip is very sensitive. Removing the card for any reason often wipes out the data stored on the ROM. Since Netgear has no patch capable of re-flashing the chip this renders the card unusable.

If you do not intend to upgrade your computer, this is a great low cost board. However if you think you will need to open the case for any reason, I reccomend finding a different solution.

MCP+i, CCNA, CNA, A+, Network+ certified. I have a small LAN at home (~8 computers). In EVERY single one I use the Netgear FA310TX. I have two in my NT Server which is acting as a router. I have NEVER had any problems with the card. Always reliable. High performance. Offers full duplex for high speed two way transmission. One feature I really like are the many LEDs (lights) on the back of the card. It will tell you if it is at 100Mbps, Full Duplex, Link, Collision, Transmitting. I have tried many others - DLink, SMC, SOHO, to name a few of the inexpensive popular ones - but in my opinion they don't compare to the reliability or ease of use (and installation!). Remember, lifetime warranty! If you need Wake On Lan (WOL) capability, I would go with the FA312 card. If you find a good deal on the FA311 card, you may want to consider that. Pretty much, the difference between the FA310 and the FA311 is that the FA311 supports the future PCI 3.3v voltage AND the 5v voltage. Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about finding a FA311 unless you just happen to have the opportunity at a decent price... Hope this has been helpful. One word of advice: -=* DO NOT BUY A CHEAP, UNPROVEN NETWORK CARD! YOU **WILL** REGRET IT *=-

Last but not least, I have heard rumors that this card is 'unstable' and 'very sensitive'. In all of my experience, both firsthand and secondhand, I have never witnessed or heard of any of these cards failing in respect to 'hightened sensitivity'...

I would highly recommend this card -- I too am an MCSE and manage a medium sized LAN/WAN environment. I have used several of these cards in my local LAN and have found them to be easy to set up and completely reliable. In my opinion, the assumed super-reliability of the 3Com card is completely offset by the excessive price. Save some money and buy the Netgear card.

After installing the card in my box, fired up Linux and had it configured and operational in no more than 3-4 minutes.

Also got the card working under FreeBSD and OpenBSD no problems either.

Unable to comment about Microsoft platform performance, though very pleased with it under *nix. So far have had no problems with the card, works like a charm.

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.

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.