Hi rat,
always a pleasure to read your comments.
It is rather your HydraNexus, which is poor. As I wrote my Ethernet (10Mbps) NE2000 card in Mediator runs at 900KB.
So, as I understand you, a rather old network card running on a slow Zorro II bus reaches 78% speed of your superior PCI solution with nowadays PCI network cards... and you call this "poor" ? Wuha.
Michael