Rosewill RC-400 Networking LAN Card With Heatsink & 4 LED indicators 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI V2.2, 32/64-bit, 33/66MHz

Pros: Cheap gigabit card. has a heat sink. I bought it for my NAS server.

Cons: Gets REALLY hot during extended file transfers. Excessive heat causes it to crash the network card- it wont work again untill reboot.

Overall Review: I'm going to buy two pci exhaust fans to put on either side of this card to try and keep it cool. If you are just trying to upgrade a 10/100 system to gigabit for occasional file transfers, this is a great card, but it needs to stay really cool for constant use.

Pros: Good price. Came with full height bracket attached and a half-height bracket included along with a cd/w drivers for many devices. The heat sink was included but not attached, but it was an easy job to attach it. imho, every chip that gets more than just a bit warm should have a heat sink, so I like this feature. The card installed w/o a hitch and the Win xp found the driver on the enclosed cd.

Cons: I turned on jumbo frames to the max setting (7k) for my first real use. The pc re-booted itself at approximately 2/3 into copying a 12gb file, which is approximately very close to the same point two other reviews noted a computer hang. I turned off jumbo frames and was successfully able to copy the file. I then successfully copied a 15gb file. I intend to try to do some more testing with different jumbo frame settings and try this in another computer to see if the reboot is repeatable on a different box.

Overall Review: To make sure my reboot wasn't due to a dated driver on the cd, I checked the driver version against the latest downloaded from their site and it is the same.

I'm a self-employed programmer and do most of my work within virtual pc's, typically 12-20 gb each - a different one for each client, and I have numerous virtual pc's for some to test different OS and applicaiton combinations with my code.

Frequent (and sccessful!) backups of these files are very important to my work.

For someone who just wants to add gb ethernet to a pc for moving the occasional large file, than this card is a decent choice, but I cannot recommend it for someone who needs reliable, regular transfers of large files.

This card will end up on my least used desktop and I will purchase a higher end card for my backup/file/media server.

I've been happy with the other Rosewill products I've tried and will continue to consider them in my future purchases.