Sam, the "hot PCI Ethernet card" that I got is a 3Com 3C905. It's a 10/100 card, but actually costs less than a 10Mbit/sec card. I'm considering installing a second one so that I can run my internal network at 100Mbit/sec - there are now cheap 4-port 100-Base TX hubs (about $200). (The connection to the cable modem has to be at 10Mbit/sec. So, you need a second card if you want the machine to be on an internal network at 100Mbit/sec.)
The downloads from the local @Home web site (I use the @Home software download as a test) went from about 450Kbytes/sec to nearly 800 Kbytes/sec when I upgraded from an ISA-bus NE-2000 clone.
I don't have anything to quantify the improvement when I went from Windows95 to NT Server. (Your results may or may not vary with NT Workstation.) But both MSIE 4.0 and Netscape 4.0 feel *significantly* faster. Subjectively, the pages comes up AT LEAST twice as fast, perhaps faster.
I don't know if the improvement is in the way NT handles the network connection, disk, software execution, etc, I just know it is much faster.
One person that I work with suggested that the NT improvement is because NT is not doing the constant switches in and out of real mode, which surely hurts any real-time operation, such as reading data off of a network. I suspect that NT is able to read more packets without retries.
Based on my experience, I think that most users will be more limited by their computer hardware (particularly network card) and OS than by the speed of the cable modem. Note that @Home does offer an installation with a network card - not sure which card they use. I know that Roadrunner (the competition) does have a PCI card available which they will install if you twist their arm, but they don't use the PCI card routinely. |
