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.
zconnect wrote on 2023-09-02, 01:33:Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest? […]
Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest?
Etherlink III 3c509B-TP
Etherlink III 3c509-C
Etherlink III 3c509B-CThe shipping is expensive where I live (canada) so I wanted to know which would be the best one to get.
All three are likely to be quite similar. They are all 10 Megabits/second in theoretical throughput and run off the ISA bus . The max throughput will be about 1 Megabyte per second on a realtively fast 486 (66Mhz and faster), AFAICR. If your 486 has PCI slots available, you would get better throughput out of PCI 100 Megabits/second card, but the CPU will limit effective throughput to well below such a cards's max speed .
darry wrote on 2023-09-02, 02:37:zconnect wrote on 2023-09-02, 01:33:Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest? […]
Running a 486 66mhz, which of these would be the fastest?
Etherlink III 3c509B-TP
Etherlink III 3c509-C
Etherlink III 3c509B-CThe shipping is expensive where I live (canada) so I wanted to know which would be the best one to get.
All three are likely to be quite similar. They are all 10 Megabits/second in theoretical throughput and run off the ISA bus . The max throughput will be about 1 Megabyte per second on a realtively fast 486 (66Mhz and faster), AFAICR. If your 486 has PCI slots available, you would get better throughput out of PCI 100 Megabits/second card, but the CPU will limit effective throughput to well below such a cards's max speed .
No PCI, only ISA and VLB.
Wikipedia suggests the "B" versions are slightly better (second generation) but I've never bench tested.
All three have twisted pair which is important obviously
No speed difference between -TP and -C, it's only about different set of connectors.
The B variant, however, adds support for Full Duplex, which does increase performance, but it isn't easy to use Full Duplex on 10 Mbps cards - they don't support NWay autonegotiation, therefore Full Duplex must be manually forced on both the card and the switch, which means that a managed switch is necessary.
Nie tylko, jak widzicie, w tym trudność, że nie zdołacie wejść na moją górę, lecz i w tym, że ja do was cały zejść nie mogę, gdyż schodząc, gubię po drodze to, co miałem donieść.
IMO it doesn’t matter. I have networked all my DOS systems with different 10baseT ISA cards, most of them are different 3com Etherlink IIIs as I got bunch of them at one point for few euros and find them easy to set up. They are all horribly slow by modern standards, but they are a godsend for these machines as they take most of the floppy or CD hassle away. You save time a lot in any case.
Just pick what’s easily available for you and be done with it.
3com 3c509b etherlink III ( TP) or (combo) ISA
These a well supported in DOS and Win 311 thru Win 98
If you want PCI you might want the 3c0m 3c509-tx
They work great. I have installed in my 486 and I can access my home network and surf the internet.
10-base-t full duplex support
in Win3x just install the tcp-ip patch first to get full support of the card.
Link:
https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-tcp- … /tcpip-32-3-11b
its auto-detected in Win3x network setup menu.
Has anyone benchmarked one of these?
rmay635703 wrote on 2023-09-02, 14:26:IMG_4358.jpeg
Has anyone benchmarked one of these?
Wow... That is long... and empty... 😁
VLB always looks so weird.
FCKGW-RHQQ2
HighTreason610 did a long time ago, nothing special its still 10mbit = 1MB/s so no need for faster interface.
rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-02, 14:46:HighTreason610 did a long time ago, nothing special its still 10mbit = 1MB/s so no need for faster interface.
Pro100’s existed in isa (I thought) you would think one guy would have done it.
rmay635703 wrote on 2023-09-02, 15:54:rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-02, 14:46:HighTreason610 did a long time ago, nothing special its still 10mbit = 1MB/s so no need for faster interface.
Pro100’s existed in isa (I thought) you would think one guy would have done it.
100Base-T on ISA is not that useful, from a performance point if view. They had a rather niche use-case at the time.
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.
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.
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.
Do those cards have any benefits in terms of playing nicer with modern switches, etc?
rmay635703 wrote on 2023-09-02, 14:26:Has anyone benchmarked one of these?
Nie tylko, jak widzicie, w tym trudność, że nie zdołacie wejść na moją górę, lecz i w tym, że ja do was cały zejść nie mogę, gdyż schodząc, gubię po drodze to, co miałem donieść.
VivienM wrote on 2023-09-02, 17:23: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.
Do those cards have any benefits in terms of playing nicer with modern switches, etc?
Yes.
Particularly as some modern network device vendors are quietly 'forgetting' to implement 10Base-T support on their gadgets. Attach a 10Base-T thing to some Powerline adapters I've come across and you don't even get link. Even though 10.100 ISA cards won't get significantly higher throughput, they will be able to connect to such things.
Note that VLB 10Mb cards do have a (very limited) advantage: by using VLB, they don't hog the ISA bus. So not only will their 10Mb throughput be more reliable, anything on ISA will work better too. Downside of course is that you have max 3 VLB slots and frequently have to add wait states to get that third one working, which means that you will possibly nerf VGA and HDD performance to do it. The use case is a LAN file server-type system with minimal ISA VGA card and Ethernet and SCSI on VLB. Still, that use case could really have used 100Mb chips on the VLB Ethernet card.
VivienM wrote on 2023-09-02, 17:23:Do those cards have any benefits in terms of playing nicer with modern switches, etc?
Very likely.
I've never experienced it myself, but saw some complaints about some modern switches with broken 10 Mbps support.
The solution is adding an older switch (eg. 10/100) between the modern switch and the 10 Mbps NIC, or replacing the 10 Mbps NIC with a 100 Mbps one.
Nie tylko, jak widzicie, w tym trudność, że nie zdołacie wejść na moją górę, lecz i w tym, że ja do was cały zejść nie mogę, gdyż schodząc, gubię po drodze to, co miałem donieść.
VivienM wrote on 2023-09-02, 17:23:Do those cards have any benefits in terms of playing nicer with modern switches, etc?
Many modern-ish swithches work just fine with 10baseT. I have some cheap HP "dumb" 1Gbit switch where my retro systems are connected and there are zero problems and I bought it 2015ish or so. You really don't know if your switch works correctly until you try. I'd bet that switches from reputable manufacturers actually support functions they should to begin with more likely compared to some no-name generic boxes.
You can also get some older 10/100Mbit switch for a few bucks/equivalent and call it a day. This really isn't a complicated issue.
Even my 3com 3c597 EISA 10/100 card does not get out more than 14 MBit/s on WinNT 4.0 on a 50 MHz 486. There's not much difference to an Am5x86 @ 3x50 MHz too. However, my Adaptec 2740W EISA Wide SCSI controller gets out 18 MB/s.
You'd probably get more out with DMA or shared memory cards, but where are they on auction sites?
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.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
