VOGONS

How bad will an ISA network card slow down a PCI system?

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First post, by xjas

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So I used up all three PCI slots in my K6-2 build and didn't manage to get an ethernet card in. I still have a couple of ISA 10BT network cards lying around, but considering how much time I spent tweaking the crap out of that thing to optimize its performance, I'm hesitant to use one.

I really only need it to FTP files back & forth over my local network, and maybe connect to a (self-hosted) dedicated game server now & then. I'm not going to take this thing on the internet.

Will having an old ISA card in the machine slow things down? I.e. is there any overhead from the driver talking over the ISA bus that will kill performance, even when it's not being used? I'm running Win98SE.

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Reply 1 of 2, by Tiido

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You'll only get the slowdown when significant network traffic is being handled (you actually transfer data), otherwise no.

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Reply 2 of 2, by Maeslin

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Since you have a NEC USB 2.0 card and are using the system with Win98SE, you might actually be better off with a usb-ethernet adapter. You could get ~7-8MB/s out of one, while you wouldn't hit above 1MB/s with a 10BT ISA card. However, AFAIK, DOS and usb-ethernet wouldn't work.

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