[rescue] PCI fast Ethernet for old PCI PowerMac?

[r. 'bear' stricklin]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:

> Does anyone know of any 3th party PCI fast ethernet board that works with
> MacOS (9) running on a Powermac 8500?

I have a Farallon Fast EtherTX-10/100 (PN996) in my 8500/180. I paid
something like $40 for it off macconnection.com, three years ago.

That said, that was the most useless $40 I ever spent, since the disk is
the bottleneck. With the old Seagate Hawk installed, I never saw more than
300 KB/sec sustained in Fetch 3. I've replaced it with a faster disk (I
forget what kind, maybe an IBM DCAS or something) and see maybe 500 KB/sec
sustained. Every now and then it peaks up to 700 or 800 KB/sec, until the
cache is full and it has to stop the processor to write to the disk.

Save your $40, I doubt you'll find a card that gives better performance in
an 8500 than the on-board 10 Mbit.

OTOH if you DO find one, let me know what model it is.

ok
bear