DGE-560T PCI Cards Arrive

There are two models available from D-Link in its Gigabit Network Adapters line: the DGE-560T PCI Express card and the DGE-530T PCI card. The DGE-560T PCI Express adapter allows throughput at rates up to 2 Gbps in full-duplex mode.

CRN Test Center popped the PCI Express card in an old Pentium 4 white box as part of its evaluation. The system requires only a 150MHz processor, 256 Mbytes of memory and an available PCI Express slot. Drivers are available for Vista, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows 2000.

The card supports 802.3x flow control and SNMP for network monitoring and management. DGE-560T shifts CPU-intensive tasks away from the host CPU and onto the card itself to improve overall system performance. The DGE-560T has on-board screening of 802.1q VLAN Tagged Ethernet frames, and also supports 802.1p Priority Tagging to prioritize traffic. The card can also detect bad cables.

In case Gigabit is not enough, the card supports 802.3ad Link Aggregation to trunk multiple cards together to form a larger pipe, plus failover protection in case one of the network cards in the pipe dies, ensuring uninterrupted data transmission. Finally, DGE-560T's Hot-Plug support lets integrators replace the malfunctioning card without powering down the system, provided the system has Hot-Plug slots and is running a Hot-Plug-compatible OS. The DGE-560T allows remote administration tasks, and computers that support the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface can also wake up the PC using the Wake-On-LAN feature.

The street price for DGE-560T is in the neighborhood of $51 to $56. The cards have a two-year warranty.