Best Ethernet Card for the Amiga?

[pVC]

I'd leave Hydra's Amiganet 1.1 for a2000... that doesn't work on newer models without little hardware modification and then it only works as last card in the chain. And at least for me it wasn't that stable in heavy use... well it was OK, but sometimes it just stopped transferring anything until next reboot

[pVC]

Iggy_Drougge wrote:

stopthegop wrote:
The best network card for Amigas is an rtl_8139D plugged into a Zorro->PCI  bridgeboard

Doesn't the RTL8139 steal lots and lots of CPU cycles?

In my experience all network cards use heavily the cpu in maximum transfer rates. Both Zorro and PCI cards use all available CPU power with fast transfers... so faster the CPU is faster you can get data. With 060/66 I got max 600k/s with Amiganet on Zorro2 bus and around 900k/s with 10Mbps RTL card on MediatorZIV. With 10/100Mbps RTL card I've got roughly 1.3M/s... When using slower outside lines, then it doesn't matter that much, but in any case, PCI cards have worked better here.

[pVC]

amigau wrote:

The A2065 (or was it the hydra?) used coax, not rj45, so it required a terminator and an older hub that still had a coax port, but otherwise worked fine (but if you find one, buy the hub and terminator with it if you can).

More cleaner solution is to get transceiver into AUI-port (at least Hydra has that port). The one which converts AUI->RJ-45. On Hydra's Amiganet 1.1 you have to switch one jumper row to different position to activate AUI instead of BNC. Transceivers used to be pretty expensive, but nowadays they can be found cheaply as used... I found handful of them from one recycling center and they worked fine with Hydra