As far as switches go; I have opted for a Linksys which hasn't yet let me down.
As far as cards go; unfortunatly there really is a difference. Both in CPU usage and performance. I started out with realtek based cards (much like the one you refer to), but switched them later for Intel cards. They give me better performance and a (much) lower CPU usage when copying large files.
Intel cards cost about twice as much here as realtek based ones; I needed only 4 which made the whole thing do-able...
