Chemical Shift

I recently purchased a generic Firewire+USB2+Gigabit Ethernet Combo PCI from Computer Geeks after making sure the network chipset, RTL8169S-32, had Macintosh drivers available here.

The card is almost a third of the price of a similar item at found at Newegg that is said to be Mac OS X compatible on the manufacturer’s website. You can save a little more using a coupon code available at Techbargains.com (10% off (Non Geek Specials) Put in promotional code: TECHBARGAINS).

Firewire, USB, and 100Mbit Ethernet all work properly in 10.3.9, I don’t have a gigabit router so I can’t test that speed. Ethernet doesn’t work in 9.2.2, but I haven’t bothered trying to check for Control Panel and/or Extension conflicts.

I’ve copied a 4.6 GB Toast format DVD image from a Windows XP system without any errors. I’ve copied around 8 GB of data from an NTFS formatted external hard drive over Firewire without any errors. I haven’t tried copying large files out via any interface.

I have a USB keyboard and USB optical mouse connected and they function correctly.

I’ve put the computer to Sleep via the Apple Menu. It will only wake up when I press a key on the attached ADB keyboard, but not from the USB keyboard or USB mouse.

The only anomalies I’ve seen while in 10.3.9 are in the Network Control Panel and the System Profiler, where the Ethernet card shows up twice as “PCI Ethernet Slot 2, Port 1″ and “PCI Ethernet Slot 3″. The combo card is in the middle slot, hard drive controller in the top slot, and graphics card in the bottom slot.

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