RTL8169 NIC performance

[meow_mx]

Has anyone used the RTL8169 cards and gotten meaningful performance out of them?

I have one of the TrendNet cards in my PowerTower 166 (PowerLogix G3 @ 310MHz / 62MHz bus) and it *works* but the performance is not meaningfully better than the onboard 10Mbps ethernet.

It *is* negotiating 1000Mbps link speed.

In 7.6.1 with OT 1.3, or in totally updated 9.2.2 it downloads at ~900KB/s from a locally-connected modern Linux box, using either Fetch or Netscape 4. In 9.2.2 with Classilla, it gets all the way to about 1500KB/s.

The 1500KB/s makes me think this isn't a thing where some part of the stack thinks it's 10Mbps Ethernet, because then I would expect to stay below 1200KB/s.

I'm aware the PCI and memory busses on this thing are a huge bottleneck, but I can get 40+MB/s from the AHA2940-U2W in the same machine with a modern 10k SCA drive on it. I'd love even 5 or 6 MB/s over the network.

Any thoughts or advice welcome!