Trilight Zone

[thedark]

You probably can't buy a new 8 bit ISA ethercard anymore, but you will find lots of them turning up at computer swap meets and the like for the next few years, at very low prices. This will make them popular for ``home-ethernet'' systems. The above holds true for 16 bit ISA cards now as well, since PCI cards are now very common.

Some 8 bit cards that will provide adequate performance for light to average use are the wd8003, the 3c503 and the ne1000. The 3c501 provides poor performance, and these poor 12 year old relics of the XT days should be avoided. (Send them to Alan, he collects them...)

The 8 bit data path doesn't hurt performance that much, as you can still expect to get about 500 to 800kB/s ftp download speed to an 8 bit wd8003 card (on a fast ISA bus) from a fast host. And if most of your net-traffic is going to remote sites, then the bottleneck in the path will be elsewhere, and the only speed difference you will notice is during net activity on your local subnet.