Which network adapter should i choose?

[Hamy]

Hi. I searched the forum/web for the last half hour and i couldnt find a good answer to that.
Here's the situation, I'm running XP SP3 as the guest OS, hosted by Windows server 2003 R2. I'm using bridge mode on a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet, virtualized as Am79C973 in the guest.
The problem is that its too slow. less than 30Mb/s and the speed is not stable at all. and it also eats up all the guest cpu resources upon network activity. I tried that again by increasing the number of cpu's in the guest OS, altho it couldnt eat up all the reasources anymore, but that didnt help the overall network speed at all. So I'm guessing maybe 'AMD PCNet FAST III' is not the best choice after all. i read somewhere that Intel ones are better because they need less emulation. but which of them is the best choice? 82540OEM , 82543GC or 82545EM?
And do you think that changing to those interfaces would solve my problem?

Thank you in advance

[Sasquatch]

The choice is fairly easy for the Intel adapters. Windows XP only has drivers build in for one of those, which is the Intel/PRO1000MT Server. The others need separate drivers from the Intel site.
You're saying that your max speed is 30 Mb/s, do you mean actual bits, or did you make a typo and meant bytes? If it's the latter, then that is probably the max speed of the hard drive inside the VM. Changing the network interface won't change that.