Cheap, good tulips...

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Geoff Thompson wrote:

> too much hassle).  I have no real affiliations to a particular type of NIC, so
> I might be sounding like an ignorant heathen suggesting these.  I assume people
> are craving for 21x4x cards because of performance reasons.

Price/performance reasons.  The 21140 cards deliver "perfect" 100BT
performance (see aged but still relevant figure on
  http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/ for a typical 200 MHz PPro performance
curve) and cost only $25-30 currently.  eepro100's are about twice as
expensive (or more).  3c905's are both more expensive and tend to have
problems with linux depending on your hardware configuration and your
luck.  There are (as you note) a whole range of other cards with
different chipsets and prices, but tulips have worked well for a long
time and a lot of us trust(ed) them, until the advent of the lite-on
clone and manufacturers that swapped chipsets on a whim and the sale of
the tulip chip to Intel forced us to scrabble for a reliable source of
cheap, good cards.

    rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb@phy.duke.edu