I personally would modify Tom's response and say that 10bT NICs are fine for 386/486 class computers because you'll never run the high color and high bandwidth applications that would overwhelm the port on a faster PC. Since you're now needing to protect that 10bT bandwidth and not waste any, you have to use a switch to consolidate the traffic without collisions.
Don't forget that the ISA bus itself only moves data at about 15bT equiv so there is no inherent advantage to putting a 100bT NIC onto that bus. If you use 100bT, the collision risk goes down and might be manageable even with hubs, but I recommend against it for this non-network reason. Every time the ethernet has a collision of a 1200 byte packet, when the 386 CPU notices, it will have to devote at least two milliseconds of time just to the purpose of putting another copy of the packet into the NIC. That time is not available for drawing the screen graphics, which are already severely hampered by the limited bus bandwidth to the video card. You can actually see the video card slow down during collision conditions. From: "Angel Gabriel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > OH MY GOSH! And I never knew this?? What type of computer professional > am I!!? lol ! I'm ordering some switches now! lol ! Tom Schouteden > On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 06:40, Angel E. Gabriel wrote: > > " 1) It only has slow ISA slots and AFAIK 100 Mb ISA NICs are hard to > > find. If you're using hubs then try replacing them with switches " > When you are using hubs you share bandwidth across all ports. A switch > on the contrary will have the full 100Mb per port=20 ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
