Anybody know where I can buy a 10/100 ethernet ISA card?

[cisip]

Its for an old Micron Millenia P200 linux box. Unfortunately, no USB and the only slot available is an ISA slot. Thanks for any info you can provide.

 

[JackMDS]

Log to this page, scroll down to, Ethernet Card 10/100

They have few of this there.

Ethernet Card 10/100, ISA

 

[mgpaulus]

Check out ebay, and do a text search for 3c515*. The 3C515 is 3Com's 10/100 ISA card. Be aware tho, that even tho it says it's a 10/100 card, the ISA bus limits the output to about 20 Mbs.... So, it acknowledges the 100Mb protocol, but only uses about 20% of it.

 

[BenRosey]

Don't forget to check pricewatch.

 

[Nutz]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what exactly would a 100BaseT part offer on an ISA bus? I though the bandwidth was limited by the low throughput in ISA, hence everyone moving to PCI?

**Edit**
Disregard. Guess I should have read the whole thread before posting.

 

[Abzstrak]

yea, at least ISA is faster than USB, but both are still MUCH slower than 100Mbps needed... just use a 10Mbps nic, it would be your best bet...

or replace the machine...

 

[Sukhoi]

Unless you're connecting to a single speed hub where a 10 Mbps NIC would slow the whole hub down, just get a 10 Mbps ISA NIC since 10/100 ISA NICs are fairly expensive and hard to find.

 

[Torghn]

Originally posted by: Sukhoi
Unless you're connecting to a single speed hub where a 10 Mbps NIC would slow the whole hub down, just get a 10 Mbps ISA NIC since 10/100 ISA NICs are fairly expensive and hard to find.

What Sukhoi said.

 

[Tallgeese]

Just an FYI for the lurkers:

This same issue goes for laptops without CardBus support. The 16-bit bandwidth limitation with non-CardBus NICs limits them to about 20Mb/s.

 

[cisip]

Thank You very Much for your response in this post. I didn't know that there was a performance penalty with the use of an isa network card. I decided to reconfigure my linux box and removed my promise ultra 66 card. After some testing, I found out that there was no significant performance loss in hard drive access with the use of the onboard PIIX3 ide controller. I now have a free PCI slot for a PCI ethernet card. Thanks again. Before this post I was set on buying an isa network card.

 

[Buddha Bart]

ISA = 16bit @ 7mhz

16bits X 7,000,000 = 112000000 bits/sec

112000000bps / 1024 = 109375kbps

109375kbps / 1024 = 106mbps

now assuming its not 100% efficient with that bandwith, dont you still think an ISA card could pull ~60 or 70mbps ?

or did i do my numbers wrong?

bart

 

[Sukhoi]

That math is ok I think, but you're still missing something. I've heard it discussed many times how the ISA bus can only handle a small amount of bandwidth..nowhere close to 106 Mbps.

 

[Buddha Bart]

remember 106mbps is still only 13megabytes/sec, which really is way less than PCI's 133MB/s

bart

 

[Cooky]

Originally posted by: TallGeese
Just an FYI for the lurkers:

This same issue goes for laptops without CardBus support. The 16-bit bandwidth limitation with non-CardBus NICs limits them to about 20Mb/s.

Is this true?? I just got a Netgear 16-bit card for my laptop; does that mean 20 Mbs is as fast as I'm gonna get, despite that it will be recognized as 100Mbs??