Looking for a new ethernet card

Theres that registry hack that allows you to take some load off of the CPU by putting it directly on the network card. Which cards support this? Im on an old d-link 10/100 and I think the 30 bucks is worth the upgrade. Or are these types of cards that support this really expensive? I dont know much about it

Also, if anyone has that registy entry that needs hacking please let me know, I cant seem to find it. I did find it before with "Windows xp tweak" in google, but now I dont know where it was...

There's no reason to upgrade unless you want to goto gigabit. The offloading requires hardware you just can't set a registry entry to do it. Even if you get a card with the hardware (and spend then $100+ to get it) you won't notice a difference as its designed for servers that do huge number of packets per second that a desktop will never see.

Oh I see, yeah kinda wanted to get up to gigabit, but I can wait

TCP Offload NICs cost more as well, and the benefit is largely moot if you use jumbo frames. But when you are pushing data with standard ethernet frames, the difference in CPU usage can be huge, but you will only appreciate this with gigabit if you aren't going to be putting this NIC in a pentium MMX box or something.

Edit: forgot to mention that if there is a security hole in the TOE's stack, you are out of luck, this is why linus torvalds wouldn't include support for TOE in the mainline kernel. At least part of it, the other reason is the performance increase is negligible in most cases.

And one last thing, Intel NICs are the sex. If you are in the market for a new NIC, buy Intel.