ISA 10baseT vs. PCI 10baseT - noticeable difference? (cable modem)

[Skaven]

I am configuring a Linux box to be my server and firewall/router. Here are the system specs:

Asus P55T2P4 mainboard (512kb cache)
Intel 166mmx oc'd to 225mhz (75mhz bus)
98mb EDO ram
PCI Savage4 32mb
Adaptec 2940UW 4gig SCSI, 12X SCSI CD
3com 3c905tx 10/100 PCI (100baseT full duplex to the switch)
Voodoo2 12mb
SBPro ISA

Its a pretty basic system. I want to be able to use it to host web-pages and FTP - in addition to perhaps running a quake/unreal server. My question is this. I need to put in another NIC to set it up as a router. This NIC will be used to connect to my 3com cable modem (10baseT only) to share the connection. Would I see a benefit in using a PIC NIC? What kinds of benefits? Otherwise I would just use one of the ISA NICs that I have running in my FreeSCO (floppy) router.

Our network connection seems pretty snappy with FreeSCO (dual ISA nics in a 486). But if I can increase perfomance, I'll ditch that Voodoo2 card for a PCI NIC without question.

Any ideas or comments welcome!

 

[tritium4ever]

Think about it this way, 10Mbps is only 1.25MB/s. The ISA bus can easily handle that kind of bandwidth with a maximum throughput of 16.6MB/s, so the 133.3MB/s throughput of PCI is overkill for a 10BaseT network card. If it's working right now, there's no need to replace it as you'll notice no change in performance.

 

[Tallgeese]

Only issues with ISA vs. PCI NICs that concern me are:

* Processor utilization
* Ongoing driver support
* PnP configurability (some ISA NICs do support this, and not a huge issue under *nix flavos)

When it's all said and done tho, I'd go PCI.