The best Zorro slot network card

[Ilwrath]

I was NOT pleased with my original series X-Surf.  It had some performance and reliability issues, to say the least.  My advice would be to avoid this one.  Mine caused mucho Zorro bus intererence, even before the ISA network card that is grafted onto it started malfunctioning.

The A2065 is a sound old workhorse, but you need an adaptor or 10-b-2 CoAx connection...  This is the card I currently have in my A4000, though.  It's cheap, fast (well, fast for 10mbit), reliable, and compatible.  What I SHOULD have bought in the first place.  I was worried that an old-school Zorro2 card designed for an A2000 might have problems on a SuperBuster-11 modern A4000, but it has behaved very well.  Designed back in the "golden years" of Commodore.  ;-)

I have heard good things about the Ariadne 2 and X-surf 2....  I haven't owned either one, myself, though, so I can't give a review.  

[Ilwrath]

Are there jumpers that need to be changed to make the a2065 communicate via the aui port rather than the bnc one

Yes, there are.

I think they're detailed in the listing at Amiga-hardware.com
A2065

[Ilwrath]

It fried your A4000 mobo? How do you know that it was the X-surfs' fault ? You didn't put an old 2.5" HD on it? The X-surf don't give enough amps (300 mA+) to spin them around.

I believe him.  When my X-surf died, it crashed my A4000 VERY hard.  Yellow-screen hardware error style.  Audible popping in the sound output on the yellow screen, and several other hints that something went HORRIBLY wrong in my system.  My first thought was that the motherboard was toast.  Turns out that the only thing wrong was that the cheapo ISA card grafted to the X-surf had fried.  I got lucky.

By the way, I was only using the network card part of it, anyhow.   I don't have any IDE devices on the 4000.  I run SCSI drives from the CyberStorm 060 SCSI option.

What do X-surf users think of the speed of their cards?

Mine was garbage.  I never got it past about 900Kbit/sec.  (110KByte/sec.), compared to about 8000Kbit/sec (1.0MByte/sec) from my old A2065 in the same computer.
(A4000 w/ mk2 CyberStorm 060 @50mhz)  

Maybe I just had a bad X-Surf card to start with....  I ordered mine fairly early in the production run, and I have heard quality improved later on.  But it left a very bad taste in my mouth, and I wouldn't trust another one in one of my machines.