re(4) driver dropping packets when reading NFS files

I recently purchased a laptop that has a re(4) Realtek 8101E/8102E/8103E net
chip in it and I find that it is dropping packets like crazy when reading
files over an NFS mount. (It seems that bursts of receive traffic cause it,
since when I look over wireshark, typically the 2nd packet in a read reply
is not received, although it was sent at the other end.)

Adding "options DEVICE_POLLING" helps a lot. (ie. order of magnitude faster
reading) Does this hint that interrupts are being lost or delayed too much?

Anyhow, if anyone has an idea on what the cause/fix might be or are familiar
with the driver/hardware, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks, rick
ps: This laptop is running a low end AMD cpu and I did install amd64 on it,
    instead of i386, in case that might be relevent?