John Maier wrote:
> 
> 
> I am faced with deciding to use...
> 
> a) 3COM 3c509
> b) Novell NE2000
> c) SMC/WD 8013
> 
> Which would probably give me the best performance?
> 
> jam
> 

My 0.02 suggests avoiding the NE2000... The NE2000 is a PI/O card and the
CPU has to poll the data out of the card ala old IDE - this is quick for
single tasking systems (read MSDOS), but in a multi-user system I'd rather
have my CPU doing work for me and not compensating for bad hardware
design.

I've worked quite a lot with the WD8013 (both from WD and clones) and
since its a shared memory card it preforms - my opinion - better under
load than the NE2000... My current flavour of the month is the GVC NIC2000
card with the National Semiconductor AT/LANTIC chipet. The GVC card is the
quad layer version (a cheaper double sided PCB version is also out) and
can clock quite happily up to 11MHz on ISA, I can't run 16MHz since most
IDEs fall over and the PCI boards no longer support funny ISA bus
clocks...

The AT/LANTIC chipset is 'soft' configurable, but sanity prevails and you can 
override the soft settings with jumpers on the card (just set the shared memory 
address in eeprom though). The bonus is that you can get a 64k memory buffer
instead of the stanard 16k one (just the ed drivers must be convinced).
Oh, the AT/LANTIC also supports NE2000 mode... but watch out not all
AT/LANTIC based cards can do shared memory...

I said flavour of the month since this is a PC world and technology is
fickle...

I'm not familiar with the 3C509 (I do have one laying here, but no setup
software for it... :-(

I'm under the impression it's a bustmastering card ala NE2100. This will
mean bounce buffers above 16MB... All I know is the EISA version goes like
hell under Netware and that if 3Com made dual versions I'd buy then like a
shot :-)

 There is a school of thought that says that busmasters are faster than
shared memory cards until there are more than 2 or 3 in a systems - of is it 
the other way round... any takers ???

et
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