[Beowulf] onboard Gb lan: any opinion, sugestion or impression?

[Mark Hahn]

> While looking for the motherboards for our 8-12 dual-core-nodes cluster,

with a quite small cluster, minor differences in the nic 
are probably going to be imperceptible.  remember that gigabit
latencies are multiple hundreds of thousands of cpu cycles,
so if it's practical to use at all, you must be using it 
extremely infrequently...

> This motherboard uses the nForce 570 MCP chipset from NVidia, and the dual
> lan bythe Vitesse VSC8601.

that's the phy, not the nic.  I think this chipset contains the MCP55
nic, which is pretty well-established, I think.  I don't know if anyone
has done an in-depth comparison of it vs others for perf or overhead.