Golden oldie question - PCI gigabit Ethernet suggestions for XP

[sphinx99]

I guess the title sums it up. I have a triplet of PPro/P2/P3 vintage PCs for various gaming and other kick-the-tires purposes that are all equipped with PCI-based 10/100 “fast Ethernet” adapters. I’m fairly confident the P3 (1.26Ghz, XP/W7 dual boot) is held back by the 10/100 adapter. The P2 (450Mhz, W98) is probably going to bottleneck the NIC, even one with offloaded processing, and the PPro/150.... yeah never mind.

So I guess my simple question (without a lot of detailed domain knowledge myself) is, what’s the best 1Gbps PCI “everything is offloaded from the CPU and we have great W98SE/2000/XP driver support!” Adapter that I should scrounge?

 

[GotNoRice]

Try for a 32-bit PCI Intel Pro/1000 MT Destop Adapter Example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/222707924914

Otherwise, if there is enough room, you could get a 64-bit Pro/1000 XT Server Adapter or a 64bit Pro/1000 MT Server Adapter, both of which will still work fine in a 32-bit PCI slot as long as there is some empty space behind the slot. There are so many server pulls out there that in most cases you can find a 64-bit card for cheaper than a 32-bit card. Examples:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/143374059306
https://www.ebay.com/itm/331552932668

 

[BinarySynapse]

Keep in mind that 32-bit PCI has a maximum throughput of 125-133 MB/s that’s shared with everything on the bus (such as storage controllers, sound cards, USB ports, etc). You may not see any benefit in upgrading to gigabit.

 

[mnewxcv]

What are you doing on those old rigs that requires more than 100mbps?

 

[sphinx99]

Thanks GNR for the suggestions... I ordered a couple of cards to try.

Ryan, noted. With GPU on an AGP bus I figured disk I/O may be my only significant contention and while it’s unlikely I’ll see GbE speeds, it was fairly easy to bottleneck a 100mbit card.

Mne - just for fun. I’ve been doing a lot of re-imaging etc. of these PCs to benchmark, test different hardware to see what’s good vs. not, etc., and in the process noticed that I was often network bandwidth limited. I was curious to see how much more I could pull out of a PPro or P2.

 

[GotNoRice]

Keep in mind that 32-bit PCI has a maximum throughput of 125-133 MB/s that’s shared with everything on the bus (such as storage controllers, sound cards, USB ports, etc). You may not see any benefit in upgrading to gigabit.

Gigabit itself is only 125MBPS best cast scenario. Compare that to 100mbit Ethernet which is 12.5MBPS best case scenario. Even if your gigabit network speeds were limited to 1/3rd of the 133MBPS shared PCI bandwidth, that would still be over 3 and a half times faster than 100mbit Ethernet.

Gigabit on a shared PCI bus might limit you from getting full gigabit utilization at times, but something would have to be broken for the PCI bus to limit you from seeing a difference between 100mbit and gigabit Ethernet.

 

[sphinx99]

Wanted to follow up on this - the tip of a Pro/1000 MT was a good one. Microsoft's windows update service still pulls down drivers (amazing for something this old!) and got the card working, and I saw a roughly 3x increase in download speeds right off the bat on a P3/933 with the NIC in a PCI slot. Kind of impressive and even useful when doing retro builds where one pulls down installers frequently while cycling through hardware. Thanks!

I'd be curious to know what NICs of this era had the best combination of retro OS support + protocol overhead offloading to hardware.