Definitely not Realtek (that CPU hogging 8129 series gave me intermittent CPU pauses during internet games).

I had good luck with Intel PRO 100 however

leileilol wrote:

I had good luck with Intel PRO 100 however

Me too. Tried two pro100s, one from 1998(?) with a large chip, one from around 2003 with a small chip, both worked equally fine.

leileilol wrote:

Definitely not Realtek (that CPU hogging 8129 series gave me intermittent CPU pauses during internet games).

I had good luck with Intel PRO 100 however

Same here. ..and yes Realtek sucked for me as well

3Com 3C905 is solid too. Never had a problem with these, revision A, B or C.

IMO 3COM 3C509 is the best NIC $ can buy. 😀

I did do some speed analysis between 3Com 3c905C-TX-M and the Intel Pro 100-something. The data and discussion is on Vogons somewhere. IIRC, with both cards utilising checksum offload, their performances were similar on a 486. I think the possible benefit of the Intel Pro 100 was that it may handle a 40 MHz PCI bus better than the 3Com card. I think the maximum throughput was between 2-3 MB/s.

Another happy 486 owner using a 3C905C-TXM here (it was lying around)
Intel gets bonus sexy marks in my book though

I'd say look for older NICs. They will probably have drivers that use less CPU and memory
Nowadays programmers are lazy and don't care much about resource usage

I vote for the Intel nics, for lower cpu usage.
Try to always use them when I can.

Won't the CPU get utilised at 100% load regardless of what brand 100mb/s PCI card you use? The CPU tries to push for the maximum bus speed but doesn't even come close. An interesting test might be to determine what is the slowest Pentium CPU on a socket 5/7 board which allows for, say, 7.5 MB/s throughput.

feipoa wrote:

Won't the CPU get utilised at 100% load regardless of what brand 100mb/s PCI card you use? The CPU tries to push for the maximum bus speed but doesn't even come close. An interesting test might be to determine what is the slowest Pentium CPU on a socket 5/7 board which allows for, say, 7.5 MB/s throughput.

I agree. I never understood why anyone would use a 100M NIC on a 486. It will free up the CPU to actually use the data if you use a 10M NIC
Any data you will transfer in and out will be limited by the disk space and RAM of the 486 anyway

For me, I used to have my http/ftp servers on my fast 486 with lots of RAM and SCSI disk access, so 100 mbit was at least 4x faster than 10 mbit. For any 486 build, if you think you're going to do a lot of large file transfers, or you just don't like waiting around, 100 mbit ethernet is the way to go.

I have tested the following cards on a FIC 486-VIP-IO board under Windows 3.1 and 95:

Realtek RTL8139C (drivers for DOS/Win 3.1/95/98 from here)
Worked fine. This card is dirt cheap and has great compatibility across the board.

Realtek RTL8169SC
Card wasn't detected and the status LEDs did not come on. Because this card is fairly new (gigabit ethernet), it probably only works on newer PCI 2.2 motherboards that provide 3.3V.

Compaq NC3120 (Same as Intel Pro/100, uses the Intel 8255x chip. Drivers for Dos/Win 3.1/95/98 from here).
Worked fine. Throughput on a network share was around 30 kb/s faster than the Realtek card. Drivers seem to be more CPU efficient as the system felt more snappy under Windows 95.

BIOS settings for all cards:

Network card in PCI slot 1, graphics card in PCI slot 2:

I had to manually assign an IRQ (9) to the network card. Note the "INT A using IRQ 9" setting below - This needed to be set to the network card's IRQ or the network drivers will fail to load in Windows. If networking is extremely slow or you get freezes and bluescreens with network activity, try to disable the PCI buffer options in BIOS ("CPU to PCI write buffer", "PCI master write buffer", etc). If you get an error message at Windows logon "The network adapter is not working properly", it's probably caused by wrong IRQ/BIOS settings.

One obvious disadvantage of disabling the write buffers is that you get a performance hit when using a PCI graphics card. Doom with CPU to PCI write buffer enabled: 29.23 FPS. Buffer disabled: 27.58 FPS.

I used a 3com in my last 486 build as NIC but I would use Intel as well.

A quality intel nic is probably the best. I use a 1000gt pro something rather

I’d say killer nic but they are hard to find and no 9x support I don’t think

I tried this out the other day.

I hooked up an AMD 5x86 computer to my Modern Linksys WIFI Extender ( RE-9000 ) which supports Gigabit connections.
The computer was running Windows 95c.
I tried several NIC’s ( PCI and ISA )
The PCI cards had trouble negotiating with the WIFI Extender Gigabit ports and would cause my computer to “lock up” ( stop working ).
But the 3com 3c509b worked great.

So the conclusion is some PCI network cards may require a Pentium class CPU.
Or may just not work well with a Gigabit port.

So I would stick with reputable NICs like ( 3com, Intel, AMD ) for use in a 486.
Windows 95 come with drivers for these NICs and so they are easy to setup.
I am not sure about the Novell NE2000 YES Ready network cards.
I don’t know if Windows provides drivers for these network cards. But they are certified for Novell Netware ( Client and server ).

To put it simple. The 3com 3c509b ( ISA ) is a Legend. It works in just about every network topology, protocol, Operating system, and Scenario. It surprises me how versatile this card is.
If its a 486 it will work with the 3com 3c509b or it most likely will not work with any other network card.

I was able to get on the internet and surf MSN.com using my Linksys RE-9000 WIFI Extender and 3c509b NIC on a AMD 5x86 CPU computer. I had 32mb of RAM and CF card.

All you need is a 486dx2-50 or better and 3com 3c509b, 8mb ram, basic video card, and a WIFI extender. ( TP-link works good )

More photos:

This might be the Best consumer Wifi setup you could get on a 486 home computer.

Oh wow. I didn’t even realize the internet still talked to old browsers like that…