Avance Logic focused particularly on the development of low-cost, highly integrated electronic components for OEM manufacturers and was active in the areas of 2D graphics and audio.

In particular, the RTL8139 series 10/100M Fast Ethernet controllers reached their height during the late 1990s, and continued to take up a significant, and eventually predominant share in the worldwide market in the following years.

The Realtek Downloads page provides drivers for a variety of operating systems, depending on the chipset, including for Windows, Mac and Linux.

[7] As of 2013[update] the ALC892 HD Audio codec and RTL8111 Gigabit Ethernet chip have become particular OEM favorites, offering low prices and basic feature-sets.

RTL8139-based NICs are dubbed "crab cards" (螃蟹卡) in Taiwan, alluding to the crab-like appearance of the Realtek logo.

The three major 1xx3 chipset versions (1073, 1183, and 1283) all featured the same chip in terms of format support and performance, the only difference being the added ability to record AV sources in the 1283.

Key players from the Realtek 1073 era were the original Xtreamer, the Asus O!PlayHD, ACRyan PlayOn and the Mede8er MED500X.

All chips ran the same Realtek SDK4 Casablanca, which offered improved user-experience (aesthetically, added media indexing, thumbnails...) from the stock SDK.