What are you planning on hanging off the SCSI bus? Your main disk? Are you planning on using ethernet for bulk file transfer or just copying the odd game to/from the box? Both disk and network will benefit greatly from the speed of VLB over ISA.

If it's your main disk, I'd be tempted to use the VLB SCSI card, the NIC would be the one to skimp on unless you're using it heavily.

Stick with SCSI on VLB. There weren't any VLB 10/100 NICs, which would take advantage of the faster bus speeds. If you want fast ethernet on a 486 system, your only option is PCI or EISA.

There weren't any VLB 10/100 NICs, which would take advantage of the faster bus speeds.

Actually there were a couple. I can't remember who made 'em, and I haven't seen one in years, but there are some out there.

Oddly enough, there is at least one 10/100 ISA NIC in existence too... made by Olicom. Granted, ISA isn't going to allow full 100mbit speed, but if your other cards are amicable to running the bus at 12-13mhz or so, you could probably get pretty close.

That same Olicom chip (which isn't all that great to begin with, 16bit interface no bus mastering) also powers a Microchannel 10/100 card. I have never seen a 10/100 VLB card in the wild, its doubtful any were made. Reading newgroup posts from the time, apparently 10BaseT VLBus cards weren't all that great to begin with.

I own an Intel ISA 10/100 card, so they do exist. See some pictures and more info here:
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

I have never seen a 10/100 VLB card in the wild, its doubtful any were made.

When I said I hadn't seen one in years, I meant that I had encountered one (and, in fact, spent a fair few hours trying to get the damn thing to work) in the past. IIRC it used some variant of the AMD PCNet family chipset, and it may have been some sort of hack-job using a bridged PCI controller... I remember it had two large-ish chips on it, one was the ethernet chip, and I'm thinking the other one might've been a bridge chip. It would've been a very late-production VLB card, probably mid '96.

I don't know if such a thing was ever available in the US... the guy who owned it bought it on vacation in Taiwan or somewhere. I remember that distinctly, because that's part of the reason it was so hard to get it working-- all the documentation and software for it was entirely in Chinese.

anything high bandwidth is going to choke on the ISA bus, go with VLB on either card if you can

Ok, I can imagine the advantages of VLB solutions, but i'm more worried about drawbacks.
Isn't VLB supposed to be kind of unstable ? Will I be able to get a 40MHz FSB with two cards ?

As for what is going to be on SCSI : my drive + cdrom.
The goal of this machine is to play dooms and command and conquers, but for this serial is probably more usefull, so NIC is actually kind of optional if I see i don't need it.

So if I understand correctly, you guys would go for VLB SCSI, ISA NIC (given the needs ...) ?
I think two cards are ok for 40 MHz.

What kind of SCSI card would you get ? I need it to drive the floppy also.
I saw this : http://cgi.ebay.fr/Buslogic-BT-445S-VLB-VESA- … =item483b6a2660 with jumper positions for 40MHz operation.
And this : http://cgi.ebay.fr/Adaptec-AHA-2842VL-16-bit- … =item359e5b5113, which i guess is good because adaptec is usually safe choice.

I'd go with ISA for the NIC. I'm assuming your video card is VLB also. If the problems and limitations of VLB were obviously enough to keep them out of high end workstations and servers that typically employed MCA or EISA instead. However, old DOS games and Win 3.1 were enough to bring out VLB's issues, I doubt the bus would have been so popular. Never the less, why push it's limits; I'd stay on the safe side by not filling up all three of my VL slots.

VLB video + VLB scsi + isa nic. that would be "optimal". If you cant get 2 cards to play nice on VLB then drop the scsi. Adaptec 15XX isa cards will saturate the isa bus @ 3mb/s And honestly, that is MORE than enough to play old games.

Honestly, I only would buy adaptec cards. their drives are easy to get and the cards are cheap and I havent seen one fail yet.

Ok i guess i'll go to SCSI VLB and see later for the network card.
Since I'm actually not sure i'll need the later ... i'd better buy a serial cable for null modem DOOM and C&C 😁

FTP is a much nicer way to transfer files than sneakernet or zmodem.