I've been "out of the loop" lately getting ready for a cross-country move. If anyone's still interested, I thought I'd toss out my 2 cents worth on 10Base-T cards...
"James Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've got several 10BaseT ethernet cards laying around and am pondering > their worth (i.e., whether to keep them or throw them out). KEEP THEM in any case! It's getting tricky to find ISA cards, and every once in a while, you'll probably find yourself wanting one. And the gods of hardware will see that your primary NIC fails the moment the old ones are carted off otherwise. > I may, at > some point in the future, want to get a DSL connection to the net and am > wondering whether using a card like this as an interface to the DSL modem > would create any kind of bottleneck. The searching I've done thus far > indicates there should be no bottleneck: my cards are capable, in > principle, of transferring data at a rate of 10Mbps (10 megabits per > second) while ADSL, as I get it, is capable of transferring data at a rate > of only 9Mbps at the fastest. As others have pointed out, there's a lot more than just raw Mbps involved. Just to share some of my first-hand experience with 10Base-T ISA cards on a 486 gateway machine: 1. The TYPE of NIC matters... a LOT. The slower the CPU, the more you'll benefit from a NIC that has good throughput. Using some low-end NE2000 clone cards, my gateway worked, but performance suffered. Replacing those cards with 3Com 3c509bs helped considerably! Replacing them with reasonable PCI helped more. The ISA bus is as likely to be the bottleneck as anything else, depending heavily on the performance of the NIC chipset. 2. Add into the mix any other processing you're planning on. If your gateway machine is going to do any sort of "firewall" stuff (filtering, stateful inspection), or proxy etc. that needs to be considered. Other services (i.e. web server) add to the load. > Am I doing my math correctly? Shouldn't the > speed at which these NIC's can operate always exceed the capacity of the > ADSL line? In theory, yes. :) But again, there's more to it than just raw speeds. AT A MINIMUM, you'd want your NIC to be 'faster' than the highest speeds, but HIGHER is a good thing! The good news is that, assuming you can use PCI cards, high-performance PCI NICs are cheap. - Bob To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
