In Gigabit class networks, the physical transmission time is small compared to the time required to process the TCP/IP protocol stack. Thus, the usefulness of lightweight protocols that reduce the communication software overhead is even higher. The communication protocol CLIC has recently been proposed for efficient communication in clusters using the Linux operating system. In this paper we show how new facilities and improved performance of network interface cards (NICs) have been incorporated to CLIC in order to take advantage of the gigabit network technology. Keyworks: Gigabit Ethernet, Cluster Computing, message passing interfaces, Jumbo Frames, TCP/IP, MPI, Linux, coalesced interrupts.