Hi,

Just thought I'd let everyone know, I replaced the ISA network cards with
a couple of cheepo RealTek 8029 PCI cards in the machine (couldn't justify
spending 3 times as much for "good" cards in this situation), and the
performance increase has been stellar.  I expect now that I'm constrained
mostly by the bandwidth available to the cable modem (and the throttles
that Rogers is so kind to provide).

Incase people are curious, I was getting about 2KB/s througput to a high
bandwidth FTP site just before the upgrade (I assumed it was network
congestion, it was the evening).  Immediatly after the upgrade, I got
150KB/s - a significant improvement <grin>.  I guess it was more seriously
broken than I had thought.

Thanks for the help!
	Rick

On Sat, 23 Oct 1999, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

> ISA DMA in general is sort of a bastard stepchild on PCI machines; often
> the cards can have to wait quite some time to get an ISA DMA cycle as
> the chipset lets other things use the memory bus.  Also, the bounce
> buffering to get data into memory above 16MB probably isn't helping a
> whole lot.
> 
> Pick up two decent-quality PCI Ethernet cards like 3c905s, Intel
> EtherExpress Pros, TI Thunderlans, etc -- you'll be much happier.
> 
> Or check with Jason to see which cards are known to work with his
> new "tlp" driver for the DEC 21x4x and its many clones; those are
> likely to be quite cheap and will perform well.
>