J am disapointed that last article about NIC is advertising products of 3COM.
J use 3COm, and INtel card, also SMC , realtek.
J have best experience with Intel. SMC, realtek is also good (price). 3com has few bad things, hungsup to often when rejoin rj45. Sorry for english. BUt 3COm's prise is so big, and card is so bad.
Why test 3 card 3COm, but one intel and one SMC?
Why used only one testing program ??
J think you shouldn't make this test ( you donn't know how to do it !! IMHO )

J think you need to move your finger up and to the right!

-- Ah sh*t! sys64738 --

I think 3com make great NIC. I am working an computer facility in my school. The facility have 60 computer with 3C905B NIC. Did not have any problem with any of them. We just use the driver build in Windows 2000.

Since I wrote the article, I would like to be clear about this.

We put out a call to all NIC vendors that we were going to do a PCI NIC card review, but since we had never covered this subject before, I think some vendors didn't give our request the attention that it deserved.

I always planed to do a follow up and add more NIC cards, more tests and more results. It is amazing how many NIC vendors are now more than happy to provide us with NICs to review. This was not the case when I started work on the article.

3Com, provided a product in every area we asked for: SOHO/HOME, Enterprise, and IP SEC. They were able to get more coverage in the first article for this reason.

Considering the fact that all three of their major cards are covered, I don't think you are going to see another 3Com card in the next review, unless they release something new.

I think more vendors should have took us a little more serious when we asked them for NICs.

I stand by what it in the review, but through all of the great feedback that all of the people that have read the article have provided, I think you will see some new stuff added to the next card additions.

Thanks for your input!

The article is a good start, and much needed. I have had a hard time finding good performance data on fast and gigabit Ethernet cards.

I have my doubts about Qcheck. It probably reflects the performance of OS + driver+ OS settings + NIC settings + NIC accurately enough, and thus representitive of real world performance. But, not pure NIC or NIC + driver. I've gotten sustained transmit rates in the 95 mbit/sec. range on Linux using modified versions of DoS programs that send RAW packets. The Beowulf crowd had favored NICs based on DEC's "Tulip" chip (now owned by Intel) as having the best performance at 94mbits/sec. Its an old chip, but still found on many cards. On Linux and Solaris, load average doesn't reflect how much CPU time is spent servicing interrupts. The load may look low, but the system feels slow with long command response times and slow mouse tracking. Are your windows numbers accurate?

I second the suggestion of testing less expensive NICs - the $10 Realtek based ones, the $20 National based Netgear, and others in between. They can't break your budget if you have to buy them yourself - that could save you money by taking less time than contacting and hounding makers for loaners and the return shipping. Copper Gigabit cards based on National's chipset only cost what single-port "server" 10/100 cards recently cost. I have a pair at home, and they speed backups. The cost is still half of what gamers spend twice a year on graphic card upgrades. Also very interesting in that price range are Alacritech's NICs which offload 90% of TCP processing from the NT/2000 OS.

Just as drivers make a huge impact on graphic card performance, they impact NIC performance. They also compensate for chip flaws. Read the Linux sources to see which chips are good and which are bad. I suspect all the drivers could be a little better, or at least tuned with optimized parameter settings.

Now that small switches are so affordable, hubs should be avoided. Current 100mbit cards still suffer from channel capture from a flaw in collision resolution that IEEE decided not to address because switching is nearly as cheap as bridging.

Keep up the good work and lobby for multiple/wide/fast PCI busses on "consumer" motherboards!