*moved to Marvin*

If you want to connect some older computers like 286, 386, you may can come in problems.. When 10baseT was the standard there was no 100baseT or faster available..
So slower computers i mentioned earlier cant handle 100baseT connections, because is to fast for the slower system.. When 100baseT was the standard we where already in the pentium 1 / 2 period.

So if you want to connect some older computers together, 10baseT is the only way. Or the NIC has to be a 10/100mbit standard.

10MBIT works fine. You can bridge coax with twisted pair as well. You can still buy coax cables & terminators on Amazon, eBay and a lot of other places. 😀

Modern LAN equipment (including my Verizon FIOS router) works 100% with 10MBIT/100MBIT/1GBIT mixed (wired).

Coax or Rj-45?
If RJ-45 DEFINITELY keep it!

Honestly for vintage computer stuff, avoid throwing it out unless it is known to be broken. Sell or give it away.

10Base2 is coaxial (BNC). I say keep 2-3 LAN cards and put the rest on ebay. That way you'll have enough to build a LAN with your retro stuff that can not handle 10BaseT. If you get a router like Compex TP1008C with single coaxial and multiple RJ-45 ports, you'll be able to introduce all your machines to a mixed network. That's extremely handy for transferring files.

I use 10mbit RJ-45 (3Com Etherlink II/III) for all my ISA based machines. They work fine on my gigabit network. Unless you're going to transfer .ISO files there is not need for 100mbit on retro machines.

^ same here

vetz wrote:

I use 10mbit RJ-45 (3Com Etherlink II/III) for all my ISA based machines. They work fine on my gigabit network. Unless you're going to transfer .ISO files there is not need for 100mbit on retro machines.

Not to mention that a standard 8MHz ISA bus can only transfer at about 8MB/s which 100mbit can saturate.
No point exceeding 10MBit. Infact if my whole network was 10mbit I probably wouldn't even notice

At best, I think I was only getting around 700 KB/s transfer with a 3Com Etherlink III. With a PCI 10/100 card, I got between 2-3 MB/s. As others have noted, it depends on what size files you want to transfer and at what frequency. If you are using Windows, you'll want to check that the mere installation of the NIC doesn't slow down performance. I had a USB PCI card in Windows whose existance slowed down performance by some small degree.

I still keep some coax stuff around but not in use. Some older machines never had rj45 , you either had to use a transceiver or get a hub that had coax and rj45 for bridging.

smeezekitty wrote:

Not to mention that a standard 8MHz ISA bus can only transfer at about 8MB/s which 100mbit can saturate.
No point exceeding 10MBit.

I noticed there were a number of 10/100 ISA NICs, some of which were bus-mastering. Did that offer any performance advantage? I always found it hard to believe that ISA would benefit from a 100 Mbps NIC (but maybe it helps if you're trying to free up a PCI slot on a 486 board)

I have a 10/100 Mbit ISA NIC and there was no significant performance increase over the 10 mbit ISA NIC. I don't recall the actual benchmarks though I did though, it may have jumped 200 kb/s, but I do not recall specifically. I just remember thinking "no significant increase" and the PCI NIC was much faster.