zconnect wrote on 2023-09-02, 01:33:

Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest? […]
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Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest?

Etherlink III 3c509B-TP
Etherlink III 3c509-C
Etherlink III 3c509B-C

The shipping is expensive where I live (canada) so I wanted to know which would be the best one to get.

Make sure you get the one with TP, because you’ll need it for your bunghole.

Horun wrote on 2023-09-02, 22:18:

Agree with no adantage of one of those 3com over another. Would get about same performance from any generic 10Mbit NE2000 compatible ISA card.... just my opinion.

I thought that this wasn't true because the 3com cards put less load on the CPU than ne2000s due to the 3com cards having the parallel tasking chip that does the work for the CPU. I could get ne2000 much cheaper.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-09-02, 23:45:

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-02, 01:33:

Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest? […]
Show full quote

Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest?

Etherlink III 3c509B-TP
Etherlink III 3c509-C
Etherlink III 3c509B-C

The shipping is expensive where I live (canada) so I wanted to know which would be the best one to get.

Make sure you get the one with TP, because you’ll need it for your bunghole.

Cornholio!!!

More seriously, while I like 3Com stuff as much as the next guy, pretty much any RTL8019 based NIC will probably good enough .

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 05:39:

I thought that this wasn't true because the 3com cards put less load on the CPU than ne2000s due to the 3com cards having the parallel tasking chip that does the work for the CPU. I could get ne2000 much cheaper.

What is your use case where you think this actually matters? Where you need CPU availability to some heavy task and networking at the same time?

I can't say anything about Novell/ne2000 spec cards, but from my experience both my SMC and 3com cards move data equally as well or badly depending on your viewpoint. 3com cards do not offer any significant performance advantage.

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 05:39:

Horun wrote on 2023-09-02, 22:18:

Agree with no adantage of one of those 3com over another. Would get about same performance from any generic 10Mbit NE2000 compatible ISA card.... just my opinion.

I thought that this wasn't true because the 3com cards put less load on the CPU than ne2000s due to the 3com cards having the parallel tasking chip that does the work for the CPU. I could get ne2000 much cheaper.

no 'parallel tasking chip' on most common 3Com 509
Re: Archiving release dates of hardware
3C505/3C523 had whole Intel CPU on board and did offload, those also cost $1000 back in the day 😀 and you could use them to paddle your canoe
Afaik 509 consume less cpu because of better driver interrupt handling yielding more thus more free CPU, but what good is all this CPU in non-multitasking DOS? throughput wise its all the same hovering around 900KB/s best case scenario
Why are 3Com NICs in such high regard?

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-09-03, 06:44:

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 05:39:

I thought that this wasn't true because the 3com cards put less load on the CPU than ne2000s due to the 3com cards having the parallel tasking chip that does the work for the CPU. I could get ne2000 much cheaper.

What is your use case where you think this actually matters? Where you need CPU availability to some heavy task and networking at the same time?

I can't say anything about Novell/ne2000 spec cards, but from my experience both my SMC and 3com cards move data equally as well or badly depending on your viewpoint. 3com cards do not offer any significant performance advantage.

Mostly online gaming where it would be using the cpu for the game and the internet card

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-03, 12:44:

no 'parallel tasking chip' on most common 3Com 509 Re: Archiving release dates of hardware 3C505/3C523 had whole Intel CPU on bo […]
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zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 05:39:

Horun wrote on 2023-09-02, 22:18:

Agree with no adantage of one of those 3com over another. Would get about same performance from any generic 10Mbit NE2000 compatible ISA card.... just my opinion.

I thought that this wasn't true because the 3com cards put less load on the CPU than ne2000s due to the 3com cards having the parallel tasking chip that does the work for the CPU. I could get ne2000 much cheaper.

no 'parallel tasking chip' on most common 3Com 509
Re: Archiving release dates of hardware
3C505/3C523 had whole Intel CPU on board and did offload, those also cost $1000 back in the day 😀 and you could use them to paddle your canoe
Afaik 509 consume less cpu because of better driver interrupt handling yielding more thus more free CPU, but what good is all this CPU in non-multitasking DOS? throughput wise its all the same hovering around 900KB/s best case scenario
Why are 3Com NICs in such high regard?

Personally I haven't seen one without a parallel tasking chip.

Isn't Parallel Tasking related to Full Duplex?
No such stuff in the original 3C509, only in the B variant.

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:03:

[...]

Personally I haven't seen one without a parallel tasking chip.

The 3Com 40-0130 chip on the 3C509B and C had 'parallel tasking' printed on it, the older 3C509 (non-B or C) have an AT&T 8350 chip without that imprint.

There definitely are differences in performance (and compatibility) between the versions, but whether that is having 'parallel tasking' or not, or the label just represents changing marketing is another matter.

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:02:

Mostly online gaming where it would be using the cpu for the game and the internet card

you will be doing approximately about zero online gaming on a 486 ISA system. Not to mention high CPU usage comes into play only when saturating the card with high rate of full size packets, something no game ever does.

That print on the chip haha thats marketing, pure BS
509 vs 509B is doubling the sram buffer from 4 to 8KB Re: Why are 3Com NICs regarded in such high regard? I dont know what 509C brought, but afaik drivers didnt acknowledge any change so it had to be something invisible to them, most likely it was integration of SRAM into main chip without changing its size.

Just found this fantastic gem straight from WindRiver, guys doing operating systems for stuff that flies into space among other things, VxWorks Reference Manual 5.4 Edition 1 https://www.ing.iac.es//~docs/external/vxwork … -Manual-5.4.pdf

The 3C509 (EtherLink III) is not well-suited for use in real-time systems. Its meager on-board buffering (4K total; 2K transmit, 2K receive) forces the host processor to service the board at a high priority. 3Com makes a virtue of this necessity by adding fancy lookahead support and adding the label "Parallel Tasking" to the outside of the box. Using 3Com’s drivers, this board will look good in benchmarks that measure raw link speed. The board is greatly simplified by using the host CPU as a DMA controller.

zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:02:

Mostly online gaming where it would be using the cpu for the game and the internet card

Internet gaming on a 486? You will have few other hurdles to pass in this case, so a brand or revision of a nic isn’t at all a relevant problem.

Like previous poster said, every game that could be played on your computer and which features some sort of LAN based multiplayer (which isn’t many), doesn’t fully load the card and system like moving massive amount of files. These games were designed to be played with serial connections, which was the more common way, so throughput of a 10baseT card isn’t an issue.

I found 509 datasheet https://www.janwagemakers.be/PIC18F452_3COM_3 … rnet/3c5x9b.pdf unsurprisingly no 'parallel tasking' to speak of. There is a long list of 509 - 509B differences:
- 4KB build in vs 8-32KB external SRAM. Document claims 509B come standard with 32KB bit thats wrong, all 509B I ever saw had 8KB.
- sram allocation. 509 had fixed 2KB RX 2KB TX, 509B allows custom 2:6, 3:5, 4:4 ratios
- power management and advances power saving on 509B
- 509B supports 8-bit operation, 509 didnt
- 509B supports 8/16/32/64KB ROMs, 509 only 32KB with mirror images programmed
- 509B supports serial eeprom bootroms
- higher ISA speeds supported
- plug and play

Nothing about Full Duplex?
Does it mean that the original 509 supports it as well?

Grzyb wrote on 2023-09-04, 08:09:

Nothing about Full Duplex?
Does it mean that the original 509 supports it as well?

This suggests that at least the b variant supports it.

http://pub.agrarix.net/HW/3C509x1/README.TXT

"duplex" word doesnt appear in official manual 😮. 509B was released before "The first version of the autonegotiation specification, in the 1995 IEEE 802.3u Fast Ethernet standard"

https://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/3c509/2002- … ber/000148.html:

pre-NWay full duplex is non-standard

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networ … 3com/3c509.html:

Warning
Extremely important caution concerning full-duplex mode

Understand that the 3c509B's hardware's full-duplex support is much more limited than that provide by more modern network interface cards. Although at the physical layer of the network it fully supports full-duplex operation, the card was designed before the current Ethernet auto-negotiation (N-way) spec was written. This means that the 3c509B family *cannot and will not auto-negotiate a full-duplex connection with its link partner under any circumstances, no matter how it is initialized*. If the full-duplex mode of the 3c509B is enabled, its link partner will very likely need to be independently _forced_ into full-duplex mode as well; otherwise various nasty failures will occur - at the very least, you'll see massive numbers of packet collisions. This is one of very rare circumstances where disabling auto- negotiation and forcing the duplex mode of a network interface card or switch would ever be necessary or desirable.

I havr memories of n-way autoneg not working all that well even on some early hardware that did officially support it.

The 3C509B (and likely all its other variants) not supporting autoneg the IEEE way (or at all) is not surprising either.

Nailing link and duplex on both sides of a link was initially a practical necessity in some scenarios. Then, much much later, for reasons that I would call an "IT cargo cult inspired policy" the practice was kept, in spite of n-way autoneg not only being reliable, but officially mandated by the gigabit era.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:34:

you will be doing approximately about zero online gaming on a 486 ISA system. Not to mention high CPU usage comes into play only […]
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zconnect wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:02:

Mostly online gaming where it would be using the cpu for the game and the internet card

you will be doing approximately about zero online gaming on a 486 ISA system. Not to mention high CPU usage comes into play only when saturating the card with high rate of full size packets, something no game ever does.

That print on the chip haha thats marketing, pure BS
509 vs 509B is doubling the sram buffer from 4 to 8KB Re: Why are 3Com NICs regarded in such high regard? I dont know what 509C brought, but afaik drivers didnt acknowledge any change so it had to be something invisible to them, most likely it was integration of SRAM into main chip without changing its size.

Just found this fantastic gem straight from WindRiver, guys doing operating systems for stuff that flies into space among other things, VxWorks Reference Manual 5.4 Edition 1 https://www.ing.iac.es//~docs/external/vxwork … -Manual-5.4.pdf

The 3C509 (EtherLink III) is not well-suited for use in real-time systems. Its meager on-board buffering (4K total; 2K transmit, 2K receive) forces the host processor to service the board at a high priority. 3Com makes a virtue of this necessity by adding fancy lookahead support and adding the label "Parallel Tasking" to the outside of the box. Using 3Com’s drivers, this board will look good in benchmarks that measure raw link speed. The board is greatly simplified by using the host CPU as a DMA controller.

Why do you think I can't do online gaming on a 486? Plenty of games back then had online multiplayer, even on weaker CPUs.

zconnect wrote on 2023-10-07, 03:37:

Why do you think I can't do online gaming on a 486? Plenty of games back then had online multiplayer, even on weaker CPUs.

Exactly which DOS games had internet multiplayer? Name a few.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-10-07, 04:18:

zconnect wrote on 2023-10-07, 03:37:

Why do you think I can't do online gaming on a 486? Plenty of games back then had online multiplayer, even on weaker CPUs.

Exactly which DOS games had internet multiplayer? Name a few.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/attribute:123/ … t:title/page:1/

All of these (both pages), plus some released after that probably won't be running on a 486, as well as ones not on that site. I've been in a few groups that play DOS games together as well. And you could also use kali too for ipx

https://www.mobygames.com/game/attribute:82/f … t:title/page:1/

zconnect wrote on 2023-10-07, 03:37:

Why do you think I can't do online gaming on a 486? Plenty of games back then had online multiplayer, even on weaker CPUs.

Perhaps you mean IPX multiplayer. (IPX = Internetwork Packet Exchange)
But this is not IP / UDP multiplayer. (IP = Internet Protocol, UDP = User Datagram Protocol)

I think you mean the common IPX ODI protocol stack that was used by contemporary games.
LSL.COM + NETCARDDRIVER (NE2000.COM) + IPXODI.COM + NET.CFG

Kali is an external software. It is neither contemporary, nor part of those games.