darry wrote on 2023-09-02, 16:31:
100Base-T on ISA is not that useful, from a performance point if view. They had a rather niche use-case at the time.
Fast Ethernet on ISA
This. Those ISA systems are handicapped first by the bus and after that due to slow HDD performance, where big number of small files really hit actual capability to move files over network.
When networking these DOS ISA machines, people should really be little bit more realistic about the use case and performance that can be achieved generally with these systems. I think nobody is going to transfer hundreds of megs or gigabytes of data between these old systems and modern computers. At least that would be a huge exception. As I said before, I have been using networking extensively with all my ISA based DOS systems. For me network is essential, because I don’t particularly like to fiddle with floppies or burning optical media, unless I absolutely need to. When I dump stuff to one of these systems, it is usually at maximum couple of dozen megabytes or so (a large game, for example). It is irrelevant if this transfer takes a minute or quarter of that, it still saves a lot of time and hassle compared to floppy or even burning a CDR/CDRW. Spending time, effort and possibly more money optimizing networking on these systems is a bit silly. No matter what you do, it is still very, very slow and benefits marginal.
To sum it all up, any 10baseT ISA card will do its job in 486. I also have SMC cards, and no complaints there either. I like 3com Etherlink IIIs mainly because they are generally easier to setup compared to SMC cards I’ve used. I also have much more of them and gotten used to them.