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Why the hate on Realtek?

Speedbird
By Speedbird
in Networking
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Hi

 

I've read some people's opinions on Ethernet controlllers on motherboards, and everybody seems to hate Realtek and love Intel? Why is that? I have used Realtek LAN my whole life and I haven't had any issues.

LTT's unofficial Windows activation expert.
 

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I'm curious about this too...

 

(I have an Atheros Wi-Fi+Bluetooth module on my laptop and I'm getting 500-1000ms ping... ON LAN!)

Mutsuki:

CPU: AMD A8 5600K @ 4.2GHz | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A55M-DS2 (rev. 1.0) | RAM: 2 x Kingston Low Profile 4GB 1333MHz | GPU: Sapphire R7 260X OC 2GB DDR5 2xDVI | HDD0: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" (SATA II) | HDD1: WD Elements (WD Blue 1TB 3.5" SATA II) connected via USB 2.0 | HDD2: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm (SATA II) | DVD: Samsung DVD+RW combo drive | PSU: FSP Hexa 600W | Case: Aerocool PGS V | Cooling: DeepCool Gammaxx S40 (stock fan), 2x 120mm Aerocool fan 1xDeepCool 120mm fan from a scrapped heatsink

eMachines D732Z | CPU: Intel Pentium D P6100 | GPU: Intel HD 3000 | RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM 2GB 1066MHz SODIMM | HDD: Hitachi 320GB 5600RPM

Acer ES13 | CPU: Intel Pentium N4200 | GPU:  Intel HD 505 | RAM: 1x 4GB (unidentified) DDR3L | HDD: (unidentified) 500GB 5600RPM

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You know when you stub your toe on the chair, that you know is there, but still do it anyways and you get mad at the chair?

 

Yeah.. Well it's like that. It's user errors that make people get mad at something that works just fine.

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Not sure if it is a hate, but realtek Ethernet controllers have the lowest amounts of hardware acceleration, thus making out a gigabit connection on one, will also cause a modern PC to have 1 of its CPU cores at nearly 100% usage.

 

Other than that, I cannot think of other issues. More of the other issues surrounding them such as with the soundcards and mic and audio output noise,that is due to the way the motherboard companies design the boards. They do not put as much effort into filtering the power and providing shielding like they would for a device such as a a north or south bridge chipset.

 

Even the high end boards skimp on this, and in many cases, at most try to make it look fancy when really they have not added much additional filtering.

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Not sure if it is a hate, but realtek Ethernet controllers have the lowest amounts of hardware acceleration, thus making out a gigabit connection on one, will also cause a modern PC to have 1 of its CPU cores at nearly 100% usage.

 

Other than that, I cannot think of other issues. More of the other issues surrounding them such as with the soundcards and mic and audio output noise,that is due to the way the motherboard companies design the boards. They do not put as much effort into filtering the power and providing shielding like they would for a device such as a a north or south bridge chipset.

 

Even the high end boards skimp on this, and in many cases, at most try to make it look fancy when really they have not added much additional filtering.

 

Their onboard audio on my current rig does sound nice and clean... But for my older rigs, not so much... The one on my laptop is terrible with a bias for mids...

Mutsuki:

CPU: AMD A8 5600K @ 4.2GHz | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A55M-DS2 (rev. 1.0) | RAM: 2 x Kingston Low Profile 4GB 1333MHz | GPU: Sapphire R7 260X OC 2GB DDR5 2xDVI | HDD0: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" (SATA II) | HDD1: WD Elements (WD Blue 1TB 3.5" SATA II) connected via USB 2.0 | HDD2: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm (SATA II) | DVD: Samsung DVD+RW combo drive | PSU: FSP Hexa 600W | Case: Aerocool PGS V | Cooling: DeepCool Gammaxx S40 (stock fan), 2x 120mm Aerocool fan 1xDeepCool 120mm fan from a scrapped heatsink

eMachines D732Z | CPU: Intel Pentium D P6100 | GPU: Intel HD 3000 | RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM 2GB 1066MHz SODIMM | HDD: Hitachi 320GB 5600RPM

Acer ES13 | CPU: Intel Pentium N4200 | GPU:  Intel HD 505 | RAM: 1x 4GB (unidentified) DDR3L | HDD: (unidentified) 500GB 5600RPM

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On my UP7 the Intel controller is 'better' not sure how exactly. The Realtek one is just fine as well. 

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Intel controllers tend to have better compatibility (especially with enterprise software) and perform more consistently. Hardware acceleration is a major selling point, especially on enterprise cards. The kind of stuff that gets offloaded is really cool.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. - Galileo Galilei
Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD?, ZFS From A to Z (Eric1024), Advanced RAID: Survival Rates, Flashing LSI RAID Cards (alpenwasser), SAN and Storage Networking

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Intel controllers tend to have better compatibility (especially with enterprise software) and perform more consistently. Hardware acceleration is a major selling point, especially on enterprise cards. The kind of stuff that gets offloaded is really cool.

Not sure if it is a hate, but realtek Ethernet controllers have the lowest amounts of hardware acceleration, thus making out a gigabit connection on one, will also cause a modern PC to have 1 of its CPU cores at nearly 100% usage.

 

Hardware acceleration.... So that's why cheap boards have Realtek. I thought Intel LAN was cheaper to implement because it was in the PCH, but looks like I was wrong. Do manufacturers have to pay a licence fee to use Intel LAN?

LTT's unofficial Windows activation expert.
 

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Intel controllers tend to have better compatibility (especially with enterprise software) and perform more consistently. Hardware acceleration is a major selling point, especially on enterprise cards. The kind of stuff that gets offloaded is really cool.

^This.

I wouldn't say its hate against realtek either, its just that intel NICs are better. Hardware Acceleration, compatibility, reliability and etc.

CPU: i7 3770k @ 4.8Ghz Motherboard: Sabertooth Z77 RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance GPU: GTX 780 Case: Corsair 540 Air Storage: 2x Intel 520 SSD Raid 0 PSU: Corsair AX850 Display(s): 1x 27" Samsung Monitor 3x 24" Asus Monitors Cooling: Swifttech H220 Keyboard: Logitech 710+ Mouse: Logitech G500 Headphones: Sennheiser HD 558 --- Internet: http://linustechtips.com/main/uploads/gallery/album_1107/gallery_12431_1107_23677.png My Setup:  http://linustechtips.com/main/gallery/image/7922-1-rkcf7io/ -- NAS: 3x WD Red 3TB Drives (RAIDZ-1), 5x 750gb Seagate ES HDD(RAIDZ-1), 120gb SSD for caching, OS: FreeNAS --  Server 1: Xeon E3 1275v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5 -- Server 2: Xeon E3 1220v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5

 

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^This.

I wouldn't say its hate against realtek either, its just that intel NICs are better. Hardware Acceleration, compatibility, reliability and etc.

Unrelated, but you have two ESXi systems? What use do you have for the second one? All the features that involve migration/high availability/fault tolerance are licensed.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. - Galileo Galilei
Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD?, ZFS From A to Z (Eric1024), Advanced RAID: Survival Rates, Flashing LSI RAID Cards (alpenwasser), SAN and Storage Networking

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I currently have dual gigabit Intel NICs in both my NAS and general purpose computer. They work perfectly! On the other hand, in my last computer, I had a single Realtek NIC that simply didn't want to work on random days.

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I'm curious about this too...

 

(I have an Atheros Wi-Fi+Bluetooth module on my laptop and I'm getting 500-1000ms ping... ON LAN!)

lan= local area network.

 

that's half to a full second of responce time, that's bad. Try updating drivers or something

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lan= local area network.

 

that's half to a full second of responce time, that's bad. Try updating drivers or something

 

I know what a LAN is... I ping my laptop (connected to LAN via wi-fi) from my desktop and I get 200+ms when Linux is up and 400+ms on Windows... I'm running the latest drivers...

 

Edit: Weird thing is that external connections are less affected with sub 100ms ping...

Mutsuki:

CPU: AMD A8 5600K @ 4.2GHz | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A55M-DS2 (rev. 1.0) | RAM: 2 x Kingston Low Profile 4GB 1333MHz | GPU: Sapphire R7 260X OC 2GB DDR5 2xDVI | HDD0: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" (SATA II) | HDD1: WD Elements (WD Blue 1TB 3.5" SATA II) connected via USB 2.0 | HDD2: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm (SATA II) | DVD: Samsung DVD+RW combo drive | PSU: FSP Hexa 600W | Case: Aerocool PGS V | Cooling: DeepCool Gammaxx S40 (stock fan), 2x 120mm Aerocool fan 1xDeepCool 120mm fan from a scrapped heatsink

eMachines D732Z | CPU: Intel Pentium D P6100 | GPU: Intel HD 3000 | RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM 2GB 1066MHz SODIMM | HDD: Hitachi 320GB 5600RPM

Acer ES13 | CPU: Intel Pentium N4200 | GPU:  Intel HD 505 | RAM: 1x 4GB (unidentified) DDR3L | HDD: (unidentified) 500GB 5600RPM

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I know what a LAN is... I ping my laptop (connected to LAN via wi-fi) from my desktop and I get 200+ms when Linux is up and 400+ms on Windows... I'm running the latest drivers...

 

Edit: Weird thing is that external connections are less affected with sub 100ms ping...

Are both devices on? it could be your router

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Are both devices on? it could be your router

 

Nope... Pinging my phone over wi-fi results in sub 20ms ping... It's only my laptop...

 

Testing with multiple devices yields the same result...

 

I remember messing with the antenna last time I opened it up for maintenance... It might be just that (and I'm too lazy to open it up in the middle of the semester)...

Mutsuki:

CPU: AMD A8 5600K @ 4.2GHz | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A55M-DS2 (rev. 1.0) | RAM: 2 x Kingston Low Profile 4GB 1333MHz | GPU: Sapphire R7 260X OC 2GB DDR5 2xDVI | HDD0: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" (SATA II) | HDD1: WD Elements (WD Blue 1TB 3.5" SATA II) connected via USB 2.0 | HDD2: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm (SATA II) | DVD: Samsung DVD+RW combo drive | PSU: FSP Hexa 600W | Case: Aerocool PGS V | Cooling: DeepCool Gammaxx S40 (stock fan), 2x 120mm Aerocool fan 1xDeepCool 120mm fan from a scrapped heatsink

eMachines D732Z | CPU: Intel Pentium D P6100 | GPU: Intel HD 3000 | RAM: 2x Kingston ValueRAM 2GB 1066MHz SODIMM | HDD: Hitachi 320GB 5600RPM

Acer ES13 | CPU: Intel Pentium N4200 | GPU:  Intel HD 505 | RAM: 1x 4GB (unidentified) DDR3L | HDD: (unidentified) 500GB 5600RPM

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Unrelated, but you have two ESXi systems? What use do you have for the second one? All the features that involve migration/high availability/fault tolerance are licensed.

Yes, i have two esxi servers and a completely licensed version of vcenter(i do HA, and migration all the time, its awesome). Right before i finished University my school started including it in dreamspark student licensing, and its still good, it should be for quite some time.

 

Before i had that, i was just using the free license, which worked fine, just none of the cool features. At the time i didn't have 2 hosts though.

CPU: i7 3770k @ 4.8Ghz Motherboard: Sabertooth Z77 RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance GPU: GTX 780 Case: Corsair 540 Air Storage: 2x Intel 520 SSD Raid 0 PSU: Corsair AX850 Display(s): 1x 27" Samsung Monitor 3x 24" Asus Monitors Cooling: Swifttech H220 Keyboard: Logitech 710+ Mouse: Logitech G500 Headphones: Sennheiser HD 558 --- Internet: http://linustechtips.com/main/uploads/gallery/album_1107/gallery_12431_1107_23677.png My Setup:  http://linustechtips.com/main/gallery/image/7922-1-rkcf7io/ -- NAS: 3x WD Red 3TB Drives (RAIDZ-1), 5x 750gb Seagate ES HDD(RAIDZ-1), 120gb SSD for caching, OS: FreeNAS --  Server 1: Xeon E3 1275v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5 -- Server 2: Xeon E3 1220v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5

 

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Yes, i have two esxi servers and a completely licensed version of vcenter(i do HA, and migration all the time, its awesome). Right before i finished University my school started including it in dreamspark student licensing, and its still good, it should be for quite some time.

 

Before i had that, i was just using the free license, which worked fine, just none of the cool features. At the time i didn't have 2 hosts though.

That is awesome. I use it at work and it's fantastic. I wish I got more experience with vSAN, that is an amazing feature.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. - Galileo Galilei
Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD?, ZFS From A to Z (Eric1024), Advanced RAID: Survival Rates, Flashing LSI RAID Cards (alpenwasser), SAN and Storage Networking

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That is awesome. I use it at work and it's fantastic. I wish I got more experience with vSAN, that is an amazing feature.

Yeah, i need to work with vSAN more actually, haven't had much experience in that. I work for a small business that doesn't have a huge IT budget, so i actually have a better license of esxi than my work does, my work has a 3 host license without vmotion or HA :(.

CPU: i7 3770k @ 4.8Ghz Motherboard: Sabertooth Z77 RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance GPU: GTX 780 Case: Corsair 540 Air Storage: 2x Intel 520 SSD Raid 0 PSU: Corsair AX850 Display(s): 1x 27" Samsung Monitor 3x 24" Asus Monitors Cooling: Swifttech H220 Keyboard: Logitech 710+ Mouse: Logitech G500 Headphones: Sennheiser HD 558 --- Internet: http://linustechtips.com/main/uploads/gallery/album_1107/gallery_12431_1107_23677.png My Setup:  http://linustechtips.com/main/gallery/image/7922-1-rkcf7io/ -- NAS: 3x WD Red 3TB Drives (RAIDZ-1), 5x 750gb Seagate ES HDD(RAIDZ-1), 120gb SSD for caching, OS: FreeNAS --  Server 1: Xeon E3 1275v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5 -- Server 2: Xeon E3 1220v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5

 

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Yeah, i need to work with vSAN more actually, haven't had much experience in that. I work for a small business that doesn't have a huge IT budget, so i actually have a better license of esxi than my work does, my work has a 3 host license without vmotion or HA :(.

Your license doesn't cover it, does it?

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. - Galileo Galilei
Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD?, ZFS From A to Z (Eric1024), Advanced RAID: Survival Rates, Flashing LSI RAID Cards (alpenwasser), SAN and Storage Networking

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Your license doesn't cover it, does it?

It doesn't look like it. I have vcenter, vcloud director, vCloud NSX, and vShield Manager. Sadly no vSAN.

CPU: i7 3770k @ 4.8Ghz Motherboard: Sabertooth Z77 RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance GPU: GTX 780 Case: Corsair 540 Air Storage: 2x Intel 520 SSD Raid 0 PSU: Corsair AX850 Display(s): 1x 27" Samsung Monitor 3x 24" Asus Monitors Cooling: Swifttech H220 Keyboard: Logitech 710+ Mouse: Logitech G500 Headphones: Sennheiser HD 558 --- Internet: http://linustechtips.com/main/uploads/gallery/album_1107/gallery_12431_1107_23677.png My Setup:  http://linustechtips.com/main/gallery/image/7922-1-rkcf7io/ -- NAS: 3x WD Red 3TB Drives (RAIDZ-1), 5x 750gb Seagate ES HDD(RAIDZ-1), 120gb SSD for caching, OS: FreeNAS --  Server 1: Xeon E3 1275v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5 -- Server 2: Xeon E3 1220v2, 32GB of RAM, OS: ESXi 5.5

 

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