NIC PCMCIA cards CPU load comparison/Speed etc. WIch one is better ??

[Jose]

Ok this has probably been asked already but...

Are they all the same speedwise?

Is the CPU load the same ?

[SilvrDrgn]

For what kind of PCMCIA card???  High speed serial port?  SCSI?  RAM?  What?

May be a silly question, yes, but it's still worth knowing.  Anyway, I bet the speed of any of them is going to be worse than getting a card that goes in a Zorro slot or attaches directly to an accelerator.

[Jose]

@SilvrDrgn:
Dammit I forgot to write that! Edited the title...

[Cyberus]

did you?

[SilvrDrgn]

Jose wrote:
@SilvrDrgn:
Dammit I forgot to write that! Edited the title...

Heh, s'all right.  You're pretty limited on the choices for PCMCIA NIC's on the A1200.  Before I sold my A1200T, I had an ApNet card in it.  It was a 10 Mbit/sec card.  I don't think there are any 100 Mbit/sec cards that will work in the A1200, but I could be mistaken.  Anyway, performance of it was reasonable, but not great.  I believe the PCMCIA port is tied directly to the CPU somehow with no DMA.  Thus, it's a CPU hog.  No matter what card you put in there will be.

[itix]

On A1200/A600 PCMCIA port is behind chip ram bus: Slow, slow, slow.
 
NIC itself doesnt matter much since without 060 you can't get full
speed at all.

[adolescent]

I haven't noticed much CPU load on my A1200/060 with a 10mb card.  How would I test this?  (ie. what benchmark captures both ethernet speed and CPU load?).  I have a few cnet.device compatible cards and also a 3Com 3C589...

[itix]

CPU usage quite depends on your download/upload speed. It is not only
ethernet interface taking its cpu time but also TCP/IP stack and the
client.

NIC itself is just a minor issue. There is no DMA. CPU must copy data
from PCMCIA card to fast ram for further processing (it is done in
blocks, maybe in 16kB or 32kB blocks depending on a card).

[Stedy]

Benchmark transfers on my A1200/040 system.

FTP between machines, 330 Kbyte/sec max.
Internet downloads, 62 Kbyte/sec max (I have a 64 Kbyte link)
Cpu load, 50% peak.
Have yet to get Samba to work to benchmark SMBFS transfers.

Using Amiga explorer I got transfer rates of around 150 Kbyte/second.

I have the Genesis TCP/IP stack.

This was using a Dynamode/Tamarack PCMCIA ethernet card (10 mbit) which came from the Eyetech PCNET PCMCIA package. The card is NE2000 compatible.

HTH

Ian

[darksun9210]

dang thats slow.
i used to have an ardiane (how ever thats spelt 10mb zorro2 card, and with an 040 i used to get 600-700Kb/s machine to machine FTP, and i could play network 68k Quake against my then GF on her PC.

samba was cool cos it was less CPU load to read/write audio data from Studio16 to a network (PC) drive than to the A4000's ide drive! :-D

50% CPU usage? you're having a giraff mate.  :-o

anyone wanna swap their old A4000 with no ram/Cpu/disk for my A1200? :-)

[odin]

I get 200kb/sec here with an Ariadne II on a  A1200 Z2 busboard when I ftp to a local PC ftp server....

[lempkee]

200.000 to 500.000 is normal to expect from a pcmcia card on the a1200 , and 400.000 to 900.000 on a PCI card with mediator.

[lempkee]

and thats on my setup with miamiDX

[fx]

I got about 600KB/sec with a CN40BC card on my A1200 Blizzard 030 under Linux. Under AmigaOS I only got ~300KB/sec.