Good idea! I have a small stack of network cards, but never tried anything else than Realtek cards in DOS. They "just work" but I have no idea how these compare to other cards.
We could make a "benchmark" list or something with transfer speed and memory requirements of each card!

For the ISA slot 3COM and SMC are populair.

I don't know what is best, but my machines have a Intel Etherexpress 16 in one and Dlink DE220 in the other

I like the isa 3coms and any kind of pci card that has builtin drivers in win95 😀

best isa/pci nic? whatever card you can get a working driver for it for your OS of choice... it's that simple 😁

I hate installing network drivers. It's a major pain when you can't get them off the network because you don't have network drivers.
Therefore, I have a strong preference for anything that has built-in drivers with the OS. For PCI desktops I like the Intel 82558 and 82559 based cards because, well, I bought a bunch of them on Ebay for cheap a few years ago.
They're reliable and they work automatically with anything I've tried them with. If you install the Intel utilities then they also have lots of configuration options, but honestly that's rarely useful.
I'm sure there's lots of good options that are just as well supported, and if you use Win95, maybe something older would be needed.
As far as what cards actually have the best CPU or RAM efficiency on old systems, I have no idea.
One negative I've encountered is that the linux driver for the 8255x doesn't seem to support all of it's WOL modes. I didn't want to use "magic packet", but that's all the linux driver enables. The other options come up as unsupported. I looked in some Intel datasheets and confirmed that it supports more than what the linux driver exposes. The driver options under Windows are a bit better in this respect. But for a retro game machine, it doesn't matter.

My P3 era Thinkpad also had a similar Intel card in it, I'm not sure exactly what chip it's based on but it uses the same 8255x driver. I have to say that it let me down. Starting about 5 years ago, that laptop was unstable. I actually swapped the whole motherboard and tested the hard drive multiple times, ran memtest86, swapped power supplies, and couldn't find any explanation for why it was acting up.
Finally under some (but only a minority) linux boot discs, I saw some interesting error messages. After googling into some old obscure web discussions, those messages led to an answer.
It turns out there was some known, subtle firmware glitch in the mini-PCI Intel network cards that caused them to continue working, but lock up the host machine randomly. This is what was wrong for all that time. I swapped out the card and the laptop has been stable ever since. I can't believe how badly that problem eluded me.
That laptop has both 3Com and Intel cards available, so from now on I prefer the 3Com.

Most of the time, I use Intel Pro GT 1000 PCI network cards. Fairly fast and have drivers available for Windows 3.11 all the way through to Windows 8.1. The Windows 3.11/95 drivers have since been taken down from Intel's website but are still available for download elsewhere. The Dos drivers for this card are also regularly updated with the latest official Intel 19.5 update being dated 10/28/2014. Latest Windows 98 10.3 update is dated 3/15/2006. Strange how they keep updating the Dos drivers though. Anyone know why?

Probably because MS-DOS boot disks can still be useful for things like ghost and other maintenance stuff, whereas Windows 9x is kindda useless outside of retrocomputing.

This is a bit off-topic, but I've always run D-Link DFE-530TX PCI cards without any problems. When I first started to network my PCs, I bought these cards because they were cheaper than most others. I've always just stuck with them for my legacy builds because I was used to them. Unfortunately, Win9x does not have built-in drivers for these.

Funny you should mention the 3Com 3C515-TX. I have one of these running in a P200 system. Be careful with these, because they aren't actually 100-Base cards. They are actually 10-Base cards with "100-Base compatibility", whatever that means.

intel PCI 1000 model, best network card ever.

Intel Pro 100 S is a server adapter, and my personal favorite. These cards do Encryption Offloading which gives your CPU time to do something else. And you can buy them for next to nothing.

Here's the eBay listing for where I get my PCI Intel Pro GT 1000 network cards from. I've purchased 4 from this seller so far and just about to buy another. Never had any issues and have all arrived brand new and sealed.

http://m.ebay.com/itm/151381494876

I used to have issues with 3com cards in I think 95, so in the end I moved to realtek rtl8139s which worked fine, and which also worked in old powerpc macs.

At some point I swapped to 3c905s, various versions, and they seem trouble free for 98, 2000, xp. Also had a d-link that was trouble free, and an intel one.

Beyond 95, pci nics seem to work without issue as far as I found.

In my 7 box I use a Xeno Killer NIC, though reviews on the web mostly conclude the supposed extra games performance of these is hype. Mine is a PCI-E but I have a pci one too.

For ISA I always used an etherlink iii plus, but I got an older card, long one with a lot of discrete components, that sometimes works [bad contact or cracked solder I think] some etherlink ii version I think.

I always stick with 3Com NICs. Any kind of 905 for PCI (905B-TX, 905C-TX-M) and any kind of 509 for ISA (509-TP, 509 Combo). I especially like the Combo versions, since having a BNC connector sticking out from the back of the PC always reminds me of the good old days of DoomII LAN parties over cheapernet 🤣

The reasons are:

- Familiarity (from my admin days)
- Compatibility with DOS, Windows 3.11, 95 and 98
- Availability of manuals and drivers
- Availability and cheapness of the cards themselves

Only once, I had some problems with a Windows 95 machine with a 905 (well, with any 905), and for this one I installed a Surecom EP325 (Realtek 8139).

I also have a Zyxel GN600 gigabit adapter with windows 95 and 98 compatibility but never tried it yet. For my rather modern rigs, I just use the onboard NIC.

I'm a fan of Intel cards in both flavours. Good reliable cards.

Funny you should mention the 3Com 3C515-TX. I have one of these running in a P200 system. Be careful with these, because they aren't actually 100-Base cards. They are actually 10-Base cards with "100-Base compatibility", whatever that means.

You probably meant to say that the theoretical speed limit for the ISA bus is only 16.6Mbps.

Logistics wrote:

Intel Pro 100 S is a server adapter, and my personal favorite. These cards do Encryption Offloading which gives your CPU time to do something else. And you can buy them for next to nothing.

Encryption offload is for IPSec. Not very useful. Maybe good for a server hosting a IPSec VPN though.

Also, Win9x doesnt support any NIC offload. Other than DMA support anyway. If you like offload stuff then get a gigabit NIC because they almost always do TCP segmentation and checksum offload. It's still not really a quantifiable benefit in a desktop role however and you need a more modern OS for support of these features.

Stojke wrote:

intel PCI 1000 model, best network card ever.

Yeah a cheap Pro 1000 GT supports everything from DOS to Windows 8. I've seen 95MB/s transfer rate with one in a 775i65G motherboard with Core2 on Win7. PCI saturation.

I use anything I can get my mits on. I've had great success success with DE220 and Genius ISA nics. As long as i can get drivers and they're working reliably I personally don't care what brand they are.