broadcom adapter trouble

[scragman]

I was wondering if anyone else was experiencing any trouble with Broadcom's NetXtreme 57XX series of adapters. We have them in our Gateway E-2610D desktop PCs (integrated into the motherboard) and between now and when they were put into service (August 2007) we have replaced 17 motherboards to fix issues with these adapters. Essentially, the adapters would stop transmitting at gigabit speeds. If set to auto negotiate the connection speed, they simply wouldn't connect. If set to connect at a slower speed (10 or 100 megabit) they would connect fine. We've tried updating drivers and that didn't help, as well as reimaging them with a known good image. We know that the wiring is good (tested the wiring with known good machines) which really only leaves the network adapters themselves. Anybody else seen this?

[Tripredacus]

I've had problems with these adapters myself, but not concerning network transfer speed. The problem with this controller (as well as the Realtek 8201 series) is that they are controlled by their firmware in a "software emulation" mode. I am not overly thrilled with hardware's ability to automatically control things, since there are definately instances where being able to have hard settings would be better. Anyways, my problem with these controllers is that Ghost does not recognise them at all, and before the days of us using PXE to image machines, this was a real big problem.