From owner-freebsd-questions  Fri Jan 30 19:10:57 1998
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Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 19:11:17 -0800 (PST)
From: Alex <garbanzo@hooked.net>
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To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
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Subject: Re: Ethernet Cards
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On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Doug White wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Alex wrote:
> 
> > > Yes, absolutely!  The ISA cards drag more on your CPU; the PCI cards will
> > > make your machine run more efficiently when doing network traffic.  I ran
> > > a NE2000 in my Pentium for ages and lost ping -f wars with PCI ethernet
> > > cards, until I upgraded. >>:->
> > > 
> > > Kingston and Dayna are very good cards that are supported by FreeBSD and
> > > are inexpensive; the crown jewel is the Intel EtherExpress Pro/100B but
> > > that is more expensive.
> > > 
> > > PCI Ethernet cards are worth the investment (assuming you have PCI slots
> > > available).
> > 
> > Do they need a bus master slot, or can I save those for my VGA and SCSI
> > cards?  And how much are the above mentioned cards (I already have a 3c509
> > and NE2k)?
> 
> I think they are busmastering, yes, but modern hardware doesn't seem to
> have issues with it.  I dont' think my old P90 (which you had to manually
> assign IRQs to the PCI slots) had any problems either.

Hrm.  I remember a caution about certian kinds of cards in my
motherboard's manual, since I can have at most two busmastering pci
devices (one is the onboard SCSI in "Slot 4").  Oh well, I think I'll
stick with my current hardware.

- alex