NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card

Other products by Netgear

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10 x 4 x 7 inches ; 2.1 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0002VITFU
• Item model number: GA511
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank

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  Electronics > Computers & Accessories > Networking Products > Network Adapters

• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 13, 2007

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card offers: Gigabit speeds for fast data transfers. An auto-sensing port that eliminates manual switches. NETGEAR's Smart Wizard for painless installation.

The NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card provides your computer with fast 1000 Mbps performance that is up to ten times faster than Fast Ethernet and 100 times faster than 802.11b wireless.

At Gigabit speeds, even large video files are transferred quickly. View larger.

Easy to Install and Use
Installing the GA511 requires insertion into an open 32-bit CardBus slot and installation of the included software. NETGEAR's Smart Wizard Install Assistant has you up and running in fewer than five mouse clicks. Included in the software is the Performance Dashboard that monitors the actual speed.

Outstanding Performance and Unparalleled Reliability
At 1000 Mbps, even large video, CAD, and database files can be transferred over the network quickly. In addition to 1000 Mbps systems, the adapter will also work with 10 and 100 Mbps systems; since the port is autosensing, there is no need for manual switching.

The adapter is compatible with 10 Mbps 10BASE-T, 20 Mbps full-duplex 10BASE-T, 100 Mbps 100BASE-TX, 200 Mbps full-duplex 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet.

The NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card is backed by a 1-year warranty.

What's in the Box
GA511 Gigabit PC Card, installation guide, resource CD, warranty/support information card

Product Description

As networking technology continues to evolve, the needs for a wired network continue to expand, be it in the home or office. A home user may find his existing Ethernet or Wi-Fi wireless network inadequate for transferring movies and home video files to his notebook PC. The office environment may be dealing with new, large varieties of software files that strain their existing Fast Ethernet connections, causing monotonous delays. The NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit PC Card allows any network to be supercharged with gigabit speeds when used with a Gigabit Ethernet switch. Experience speeds up to 10 times faster than Fast Ethernet and 100 times faster than 802.11b wireless. Take your network experience to the next level with an upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet via the GA511.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works as expected, May 9, 2007

By	Anil Gupta "anilg14" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this card for use with a linux laptop (Dell Inspiron 5100). And it worked right out of the box. I am running Fedora Core 6. Keep in mind that you wont be able to get the full gigabit speeds with a PCMCIA card. My cursory testing got me around 380Mbps.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Warning - NDIS 2.0 drivers are NOT supplied despite what box says, December 4, 2005

By	Edward Sterling "PC Doctor House Calls" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

You would think that a gigabit PCMCIA card would be just what most Norton GHOST or Altiris users were waiting for...network imaging would now hopefully be complete in a fraction of the usual 100 Mbit time. So I was excited to see on the GA511 box that NDIS 2.0 drivers were included!!! Imagine my surprise when I got home, opened the box, checked the product CD, and FOUND NO NDIS drivers !!! Several inquiries to Netgear Tech Support have confirmed NO NDIS drivers are included and none planned!!! Are they insane? Laptops and drive imaging using products like GHOST were made for each other, and now Netgear won't support NDIS 2.0 for GHOST and similar boot-disk imagers? It's simply false advertising, with no apologies! Avoid this card and wait for Linksys or Belkin to offer the same WITH an NDIS driver.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not fully tested - should however work, May 26, 2006

By	Dinko B "Dink" (USA) - See all my reviews

I wanted to elaborate something on Ghost and NDIS drivers. True, the CD didn't have the NDIS driver but there is an alternate source.

I didn't have any difficulty installing this on an XP machine. Speed was ok, but I think this would be as good as it gets considering notebook PC's. For Example I have gotten about 20% of improvement sending data over 10/100 network card which is onboard Intel. However, receiving data was about 50% percent of improvement but I still can't claim for sure.

Regardless it wasn't worth the money (I'll be honest I bought it elsewhere locally).

Much better price and similar performance was Trendnet TEG-PCBUSR Gigabit PCMCIA network adapter. I am still not happy with the speed but like I mentioned, likely as good as it gets. Realtek network cards have been very good to me so no complains there since they are getting their drivers updated frequently, even for DOS.

About the Ghost; Trendnet TEG-PCBUSR offers DOS driver for the Realtek 8169 PCMCIA based network cards. Files required are RTPCI.EXE and RTBIOS.COM that will open up the PCMCIA port in DOS mode. Then load the .dos driver. This """should""" (not tested and I repeat NOT TESTED) work for this card as well, since its Realtek 8169. However, you can't use standard ghost boot disk as loading RTPCI.EXE and RTBIOS.COM through config.sys will crash the PC. Instead one should use something like netbootdisk by easily appending these two files to floppy and autoexec.bat. However, don't expect a great performance, 280 Megabytes per minute at most. Absolute winner (for me) in PCMCIA Ghost performance is Netgear FA511 (380 Megs per minute) but it's also least compatible. FA511 is the same as COMPUSA 10/100 card (They are both ADMTek based adapter and both tested fine) and they have both exceeded the onboard Broadcomm 440 / 330 Megabytes per minute.

Based on that GA511 will likely work with Ghost on older laptops where FA511 I couldn't get to work (3 out of 7 laptops would work with Netgear Fa511). And if you want something to work with every laptop though slow, get Netgear FA411 (16 bit, 40 - 80 megabytes per minute but it won't stall - tested on 9 laptops at least).

All in all, I am planning to purcahse this card to do some more testing.