5 year old 3COM, or brand new Belkin PCI NIC?

[jrichrds]

Have network cards gone the way of winmodems, with the newer cards offloading more and more of the processing onto the system CPU? Or are the newer cards with their minimalist board designs and dirt-cheap prices just as good or even better performance-wise thanks to technology improvements?

In other words, would you still choose a 5 year old 3COM 10/100 PCI NIC (with the Parallel Tasking chip) over a brand new Belkin 10/100 PCI NIC?

 

[Mitzi]

Use either...as long as it works I don't think it would matter.

 

[JackMDS]

NIC is not a DialUp Modem.

As far as Home/SOHO Network goes.

Take a look at a comparison between a $5 NIC, and the two popular Anti-Anxiety* NICs.

Link: Comparing NICs (Notice How the SMC did well as compare to the Giants It is $5 card),

*People who get anxious about Computer Hardware feel comfortable with expensive brand names, hence Anti-Anxiety.

 

[cmetz]

JackMDS, Tom's Hardware has a well deserved bad reputation. I'm doubly surprised you'd post a link to them here

jrichrds, "WinModem" style no, but some network cards do more work in hardware and have better I/O capabilities, and some don't. For example, the RealTek 8139 controller (found on most cheap 10/100 NICs sold now) is about as bare-bones as it gets, and so the CPU has to do more work to feed it. In contrast, the Intel 82559 chips have a good ring-buffer bus-master I/O setup, and can do hardware checksumming too. The main consequence of all this is a slight difference in idle-system performance and a bigger difference in loaded-system performance. That is, if your CPU is doing nothing anyway, it isn't a big deal for it to spend its time driving the NIC, but if your CPU is busy (say, drawing frames for a game), then either network performance drops or app performance drops. This is not so much different from the difference between a good SCSI controller and an IDE controller - on disk-only benchmarks, IDE looks like it's as good or even faster, but on a heavily loaded system you're still way better off with SCSI. The cost jump is also similar as a factor (big percentage jump from a $5 NIC to a $30 NIC!). But still, an Intel Pro/1000 MT is about $33 last I checked and a Netgear GA302T is about $24. Both of those gigE controllers have good I/O and some extra CPU offload features, plus they're gigabit, and they're not particularly expensive.

Back to your original question, the 3Com you currently have should be better than the new Belkin - almost certainly the Belkin is a RTL8139, which has relatively poor performance.

 

[jrichrds]

Interesting info, thanks cmetz.