Hamish Moffatt coughed up fur ball on Chris MacKenzie's plate about NE2000

 >> NE2000's in a PCI flavour would be a waste of time. NE2000's are
 >> good cards but a tad on the slow side.

 HM> In my environment, they're as fast as any other card in their price
 HM> range, and pretty damn close to theoretical speed limits. With a
 HM> decent 486-100 system or so an NE2000 can get a benchmark (using the
 HM> IPX mode of FastLynx) of 67MB/min, which is > 1MB/s, which is pretty
 HM> good (since Ethernet is 10mbit/s).

What sort of environment, how many workstations and/or servers ?

All NIC's will run great in a limited setup (ie. Burst), but as soon as you
ask them to do some real work on a congested network - just watch those
rates drop.

That's what I found on my Netware 4.10 switch network at work (128 nodes, 4
fileservers).

I had 16 station with NE2000's (ISA) and 4mbit/s. I changed them for some DE205
(Digital Equipment Corp. Etherworks3 Turbo -ISA) and the rates shot up to
7mbit/s. A noticable difference.

One feature that I like with the more expensive cards is the buffer mode
(2K default all the way to 32K and all onboard the NIC !) *8-)

 HM> I have an SMC 8013 here, 16 bit ethernet card. The Linux
 HM> Ethernet-HOWTO recommends the SMC 8013 if you're after a fast, simple
 HM> ethernet card for ISA. My tests show that this card is as fast as the
 HM> NE2000 in the same machine. My only reasons for buying a PCI one are
 HM> that's PCI is the future, to free an ISA slot, and for novelty value.

Like I said above, it all depends on what you expect them to do.

Rgds, Chris

... Drive defensively -- buy a tank.
--- GoldED 2.50.Beta6+