Going gigabit ethernet, cheap or expensive hardware?

[Ilwrath]

Well, with the card, the only concern I'd see is that maybe the drivers wouldn't be up to par.  I always like Intel and 3COM because you know they'll be well supported in Win32/Win64/Linux/whatever.  Other than that, I've largely found a card is a card.

As for the switch...   Should be fine, unless for some reason you need/want advanced management features.  Personally, I'm a geek, and enjoy the finer-grained options a managed switch allows for.  But managed gigabit switches are still damn expensive.

Looks like a pretty good compromise to me.  (shrug)

[Ilwrath]

I did my old FL house with cat 5 and 100Mbit equipment. I found the speed to be quite slow for our usage.

Wow.... What were you doing?  The only time I started running into noticible slowing at 100Mbit was at a mid-sized LAN party I threw.  ~8 people pulling down 600MByte patch images and cross-sharing files between ultra high-end machines (the slowest tipping the scale at 2.8Ghz).  Overwhelmed the switch I had, and we had lots of problems.

Might you have had some auto-detect errors on your hardware?  I had to force most NICs to 100/Full on my old switch.  It was a crapshoot what would happen if you left both the switchport and the NIC as "Autodetect".  THAT'LL hurt performance, for sure!  I wonder if you were having a similar issue...