I have a Intel Pro 1000 GT and have used it in a variety of old boards without much trouble.

I think it would be a bit faster but 13-14MB/s is already pretty good for that platform. I don't think Win9x supports any offloading. I think if you want to saturate a gigabit NIC you need to get up to circa 2005 hardware and you would ideally want Windows Vista or later.

After pci 2 , I never understood the point of 2.2 or 2.3.

You gained msi? Maybe, seemed like a dumb thing . 5v was dropped at some point.

Add to this some pci 2.3 will work in 2.2

Does PCI 2.3 adapter works in PCI 2.1 slot?

I got around 18MB/s with an 8169 on a 430TX/200MMX system running kernel 2.4.20.

Getting >10MB/s on Win98 with *anything* is already blowing the lid off of my expectations.

I forgot the mention, that the OS is Windows 2000 Pro.

The Intel RC82540em on the Asus CUBX-L boots up fine.
But it’s a really daft idea.
The total bandwidth of the PCI bus (across all slots combined) is around 1 Gbps.
It makes absolutely no sense.

Why copy files? With a ATA-33 drive controller, just running stuff off network drive is probably faster. Presuming you get your DMA on.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-29, 18:36:

Why copy files? With a ATA-33 drive controller, just running stuff off network drive is probably faster. Presuming you get your DMA on.

It all depends on which bus connects the southbridge and northbridge, and which bridge houses the PCI controller.
It may turn out that the data path from any peripheral to memory is limited to 1 Gb/s for all devices.

Intel 1G will have probably the best performance (and I don't like Intel). The more modern NICs have a separate interrupts for each CPU. Also Management Engine started as some coprocessor on Intel NIC. I pretty sure nothing like that is on realtek NICs.

My PRO/1000 GT works on 486. You can also get PCI->PCIe adapter and buy PCIe NIC btw 😉.

But as other say, transferring HDD data with celeron 300A will be slow anyway (the bandwidth will be split between this NIC, IDE, ISA and probably some other stuff too).

shevalier wrote on 2026-05-29, 15:43:

The Intel RC82540em on the Asus CUBX-L boots up fine. But it’s a really daft idea. The total bandwidth of the PCI bus (across al […]
Show full quote

The Intel RC82540em on the Asus CUBX-L boots up fine.
But it’s a really daft idea.
The total bandwidth of the PCI bus (across all slots combined) is around 1 Gbps.
It makes absolutely no sense.

even if the gigabit card can only work at 20%, that's still DOUBLE the speed of a 100Mbps card

so it actually makes perfect sense

maxtherabbit wrote on 2026-06-01, 14:16:

shevalier wrote on 2026-05-29, 15:43:

The Intel RC82540em on the Asus CUBX-L boots up fine. But it’s a really daft idea. The total bandwidth of the PCI bus (across al […]
Show full quote

The Intel RC82540em on the Asus CUBX-L boots up fine.
But it’s a really daft idea.
The total bandwidth of the PCI bus (across all slots combined) is around 1 Gbps.
It makes absolutely no sense.

even if the gigabit card can only work at 20%, that's still DOUBLE the speed of a 100Mbps card

so it actually makes perfect sense

There will be fierce competition for bandwidth on the shared bus. I’m not sure this will be good for low-latency devices, such as sound cards.
Gigabit NICs really came into their own when they switched to PCI-e, which, topologically speaking, is not a bus but a point-to-point connection.

It is saturating the storage controller before it saturates the bus. Unless you want to blip small files to and from RAM disk, in which case the selecting files and looking to see if they are there takes longer than the transfer.

But yes the whole bandwidth it can use is subject to other peripheral use, so if you are listening to MP3s with a DDraw visualiser running while trying to transfer files, you are adding more storage, PCI for sound, PCI for video loads in there and are gonna slow yourself down.

Probably the optimum situation is to push files from the fast computer end, while the slowass target is otherwise idling, with the screen powered down.

Under windows the setting, where you find the swapfile settings, forgetting the name of the window, "optimise role of this computer" desktop or server, setting that to server might allow more caching and take the edge off a bit too.

So I bought Intel PRO/1000 GT 😀

... after installation into the computer copying a large file yelds roughly 70% CPU usage and 15.5-16MB/s speed (an improvement of 3MB/s 🤣)
is there better way to test the NIC? something like iperf for windows?

Havis wrote on 2026-06-16, 22:32:

So I bought Intel PRO/1000 GT 😀

... after installation into the computer copying a large file yelds roughly 70% CPU usage and 15.5-16MB/s speed (an improvement of 3MB/s 🤣)
is there better way to test the NIC? something like iperf for windows?

iperf v2 works on Win9x