PCI Gigabit Ethernet on the cheap

I am the proud owner of several Sawtooths; these were the last PowerMac to have 10/100 ethernet.

I bought two Trendnet TEG-PCITXR PCI gigabit ethernet cards for only $12 each on ebay.  I am happy to say that it works perfectly and uses built in drivers found in 10.5.2+.

Here is a product page for it:  TEG-PCITXR

It lists nothing about mac compatibility, but I read on a couple different sites that these worked in 10.5.2+ so I gave them a try. Glad I did.  It's also a great idea for firewall systems that need 2 ethernet or even a PowerMac with dead onboard eth.

So any PowerMac with PCI and 10.5 can easily benefit from this card.  I am loving the true gigabit speed.  It makes network drives perform like local drives.


EDIT:

After further testing I have found that these cards do work under 10.4.11.  I had one working on both my G4 upgraded G3 tower, and one of my spare Sawtooth.  Both were running 10.4.11.

I have been using the two cards under 10.5 for over a year and they offer very reliable and consistent performance.  I get around 27MB/sec on average, and up to 34MB/sec when transfering between my two Sawtooth.  Far better than the 4-11MB/sec I get on the built in 10/100.

These cards also work perfectly in Debian and Lubuntu Linux.  There seems to be no OS I use that these don't work perfectly with.  OpenBSD also.

These cards are a must for G4 towers.  The built in ethernet on my Gigabit (Mystic) tower only gets around 20-21MB/sec vs these cards that are 27-34MB/sec as I mention above.