That'd be a big list.

The RTL8169 works in DOS, and is Gigabit. It only has an auto installer for 98SE/ME, but you might be able to manually install the driver for 95.

Gigabit adapters are not ideal as they usually have no native packet drivers. They usually have ODI drivers but those require more RAM.

It's been a while since I last used it, but I believe the RTL8169 uses a NDIS2 driver (not sure what that means, though). I have run the Dillo browser (DilloDOS) without issue. Other than that, I was mostly doing it because I could.

Intel Pro100S works nicely with 95, RTL8169 works too if you have the NDIS2 driver rather than the later NDIS4 one which will only work in 98/SE/ME.

Great ty. I have the Realtek 8139d and Realtek has a driver for dos and win98 but I don't feel like tweaking and troubleshooting to get it working on win95. I'll try the Intel pro100s.

8139 will have drivers for pretty much everything imaginable, including 95 : http://www.tmeeco.eu/9X4EVER/GOODIES/RTL81392/
Intel card will perform better though.

3Com cards are my go-to. They're fast enough in full-duplex mode (you may have to run a DOS-based config utility to toggle yours on, mine came to me with it already on) and have drivers for everything under the sun. Baked in drivers under 95 and later for my preferred models (3C-905 non-B or C models for PCI, 3C-509 for ISA). They're cheap and ubiquitous, I walked out of my high school with six 905s one day because they were just throwing them out.

I hate the 3com's for PCI, the ISA are OK for me, but with win9x and PCI I always got lockups and lost the connection to the nas when copying large amount of files.
I never got any problems with the intel pro100. So my vote goes for the intel-network cards. They are really good.

Intel cards are good, with good support. I never had the problems you describe with 3Com, in fact my employer actively distributed 3Com 3C900 PCI cards to new customers in the Win98SE era because of their trouble-free operation (cable internet in the days before NICs became standard in computer systems). In fact I'd go so far as to say that anything with decent driver support would be usable - Win9x is so inefficient anyway that the difference in NIC performance are far less relevant than in 2k/XP, where you really notice that RTL81xx suck more CPU than Intel/3Com.

Another thing to watch: by far the commonest and cheapest PCI NICs are Realtek RTL8139-based. Not a NIC anyone would love but usable enough with drivers still available from the vendor. But... there are multiple revisions of that chip. Everything from 8139C onwards requires PCI 2.2, so won't work on say i440BX-era boards (with PCI 2.1). 8139B is a safe bet though.

dionb wrote:

Win9x is so inefficient anyway that the difference in NIC performance are far less relevant

Agreed! and even in later OS's its not like these are servers or anything, What are we talking about, file transfer every now and then and maybe a LAN game or 2? it's not going to be that much of a bottleneck.
I'd prioritize multiple OS support over performance

dionb wrote:

8139C onwards requires PCI 2.2

Didn't know this, Thanks!

trist007 wrote:

Great ty. I have the Realtek 8139d and Realtek has a driver for dos and win98 but I don't feel like tweaking and troubleshooting to get it working on win95. I'll try the Intel pro100s.

90% of Win98 drivers will work in 95 if you install via device manager rather then the setup.exe, I would just see what cards you already have before going out and getting something

chinny22 wrote:

90% of Win98 drivers will work in 95 if you install via device manager rather then the setup.exe

Nevertheless, Realtek provides three different drivers for Windows 9x:

NDIS 3 mini-port driver for Windows 95 Win95A
NDIS 4 mini-port driver for Windows 95 OSR2
NDIS 5 mini-port driver for Windows 98

For PCI, I use a Linksys LNE100TX V1.0 or V2.0 -- supports DOS, Windows 3.1 WG/95/98/ME, NT 3.5/4.0, OS/2 WARP. It also has a DIAG.EXE utility that runs in DOS so you can setup the card and test it. Personally, I have ran it under DOS, Windows 3.11, and Windows 95 on my Compaq Presario 9232.

Early LNE100tx cards (as well as higher end FE cards from Belkin, Netgear, etc) use the DEC Tulip 21140 chipset, which is excellent. Newer versions used clone chips from Macronix and ADMtek which perform up to standard but might require specific drivers, so please be aware and make sure you've got the right software.