I believe I understand your point: "why spend more when you can get a 
cheap card that does more than I need" and I agree with that sentiment 
completely.  However, performance is not the issue that is really being 
discussed, at least in my mind, and it is not the only point the writer 
of the driver for FreeBSD makes, just one of them.  The fact that the 
performance on RealTek sucks and puts extra strain on the CPU is not 
really much of a concern if your running a modern system, although it 
might be if your system is strained by other requirements like  email 
services, web services,  file sharing, etc.

The real issue (in my mind) is whether or not the RealTek cards flake 
out under pressure - in my experience they do, but it seems that there 
are quite a few others who have had good luck with them.  That's great, 
but I would still want to get a RealTek card out of the way if I was 
having network problems just to remove it from the troubleshooting loop.

Jeff

Alex Neuman van der Hans wrote:
>
>
> Jeff Buehler wrote:
>> * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent
>> * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or
>> * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it.
> The cheapest hardware I can easily get off-the-shelf is on steroids 
> compared to an "overmuscled" PII. Since most of the time they're 
> hooked to 1-2Mbps links, it means I've got Schwarzenegger 
> benchpressing sheets of paper.
>