Hi,

I wondering about intel and dlink gigabyte desktop nic card price point, May i ask if someone know the difference between the two gigabyte nic card, I found at my local electronic store that theres a price difference between the two the intel is double the price of the dlink although the are the same gigabyte nic card. How about the features, Im referring the PCI express x4.maybe network performance,brand name or speed, i had no clue for now..

Hope someone knows some related info..

Thanks in advance..

Don't go by the brand, go by the chipset. Intel is going to be Intel, obviously. D-link is probably going to be Realtek, which has never been famous for performance or reliability -- just price. One thing you'll notice about Realtek cards is that they waste a lot of CPU to do the same work a better card does with less.

As an aside, I don't reccomend D-link products.

Routers: We used to sell D-link wireless routers here at work, until one quarter we had 50% of them come back faulty. Not the same fault, or even the same model, but a variety of strange and interesting faults ranging between "refuses to let me go to hotmail.com" and "nearly caught fire".

Switches: A d-link router turned out to be the culprit of severe performance issues on our gigabit network. It negotiates as 1000baseT, but cheats by spamming pause packets until it's back down at 100baseT performance.

@Corona688: How about the atheros chipset, i know atheros works great in linux thats what i like but how about performance and reliability, have some experience on it.. i notice on the my nearest electronic store the TP-Link routers they put additional sticker telling that this router has atheros chipset on it, its like they implying that there router has better chipset because it has atheros chipset...

Your question has shifted from network cards to wireless routers; "Go by the chipset" isn't so relevant here since it's not a card that plugs into your computer. If you were interested in modding the router by installing a custom OS on it, then the chipset would be relevant. That may be why they put the sticker on it -- to appeal to the modding market, by informing them it uses chips Linux has drivers for. Most wireless routers I've dealt with use Broadcom, which has no really good drivers except the proprietary binary-only one.

I haven't dealt with TP-link products much. Bottom line you don't get more than you paid for, if they're generally as cheap as D-link then they can't be much better.

Agree, and in most cases they are cheap.