maxtherabbit wrote on 2023-10-08, 03:07:
Saying "ISA NICs all perform within margin of error of each other so it doesn't matter" is a valid answer. Moaning about use case and other pseudo-practical questioning is folly.
It has been said many times already in the first replies of this thread.
Use case is important here, because OP apparently wanted NIC with as small CPU load as possible. This got me asking what is his use case where he thinks this matters, because I can't think of any other use case where high CPU load would apply other than file transfers because of saturated bandwidth. But it doesn't matter if it does, because you aren't doing anything else at the same time in any case. So, perhaps there is indeed some niche I don't understand so I was curious and that would perhaps help others to give correct advice so most suitable card could be indeed found. Apparently that use case is online gaming with 486, so yeah...
Indeed, correct answer more or less is "ISA NICs all perform within margin of error of each other so it doesn't matter". I have SMC and 3COM ISA 10baseT cards and have found no practical differences other than how you setup them, but performance differences between those are negligible.