jordan@Morgan.COM (Jordan Hayes) (07/06/90)
So, what's the scoop? Where's the cheapest place to get the best one? Dove FastNet III is like $395 most places, but MacUser says it's slow. The same issue says that the Gator card is much better and cheaper, but i've only seen it one place that had it, and it was like $495. MacII/NuBus/Thick|Thin ... Are there differences if you just want to run MacTCP to a Sun? I know there are some differences between the drives you can get for phase 1/2, but that's all ether-talk, right? I just want to use this to get to non-macs. /jordan
ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) (07/07/90)
< Dove FastNet III is like $395 most places, but MacUser says it's slow. Has anyone been able to duplicate the MacUser tests? For example, one of the tests was supposed to be raw throughput, which they say they tested with some expensive network analyzer. I tried to measure raw throughput of my FastNet III card. I don't have any network analyzer, though. Here is what I did: 1. Modify a Dove FastNet SCSI box so that it is running an Ethernet echo program. This program simply takes incomming packets and blasts them back out. 2. Write a program for my Mac II that opens the .ENET driver and blasts out packets for a fixed amount of time. 3. The program from step two counts how many echo packets come back in that fixed amount of time. Using this program, I got reasonable performance from FastNet III. Using packets of 1500 bytes, I got a lot higher throughput than MacUser claimed for the fastest card. If I can find a way to duplicate the MacUser results, I can find out why FastNet III was slower and then fix it (I wrote the drivers that Dove is using). Now the FastNet III card should theoretically be slower than some other NuBus cards, because it has 16 bit memory mapped into a 32 bit address space (i.e., addresses 0,1,2,3,4,5,... on the card appear in the Mac address space as S00000,S00001,S00004,S00005, S00008,S00009,..., where S is the slot number), which means that getting data on and off of the card is a little slower than it would be for a full 32 bit card, but this is not a big enough difference to cause the MacUser results. I seem to remember some MacWorld benchmarks that also had FastNet III slower than some other cards, but not by a lot. In fact, by about the amount one would expect based on the 16 bitness of the card. Tim Smith
monty@tempone.Central.Sun.COM (Monty Solomon) (07/08/90)
In article <1187@s5.Morgan.COM> jordan@Morgan.COM (Jordan Hayes) writes: >So, what's the scoop? Where's the cheapest place to get the best one? I think that MacConnection sells the NuvoLink II card for < $300. -- # Monty Solomon / <monty@sunne.east.sun.com> # PO Box 45249 / Winter Hill, MA 02145-0003