Oops, I meant to mention this too .... virtually all GigE and/or server class NICs do TCP checksum offload.
Dimitri - it's unlikely that you have a hardware issue on the NIC, it's more likely to be a cable problem or network congestion. What you want to look for in the tcpdump capture is things like SYN retries.
A good way to test for cable issues is to use a ping flood with a large packet size.
Cheers
Dave
Hang on a sec. You need to ignore bad checksums on *outbound* packets, because many (most?) Ethernet drivers implement some level of TCP offloading, and this will result in packet sniffers seeing invalid checksums for transmitted packets - the checksums haven't been generated by the NIC yet.
Unless you know for sure that your NIC doesn't do TSO, ignore bad checksums on outbound packets from the local interface.
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Craig Ringer