[vortex] Performance tests with 3c905B

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Sun, 23 Sep 2001, Thomas Ackermann wrote:

> I esp. try to read from the filesystem and over caches because i want to
> make backups over the net.

OK, now I understand. However, in this case, one should not expect a
perfectly constant speed exactly because there are too many "components".

> That's an important information! But the driver by itself does not give
> info about the quality of a card, does it?
> I mean, only because a card is driven by 3c59x does not mean that the card
> realy is good, or?

You're right, but a good card can do nothing without a good driver
either. Moreover, sometimes drivers can hide/work around design
shortcuts/bugs...
The 3c59x driver supports quite a lot of cards; in my previous remark I
was referring to 3C905B and 3C905C (and 3C920, 3C980 and others). IMHO,
these are good cards, but my oppinion might be subjective: I use quite a
lot of them (both B and C).

> Can you tell me some explizit cards that are known as good?
> (For example 3c905B compared to 3c905C ...)

The differences between 905B and 905C are not very important. 905C has
some added features, but the current drivers do not take advantage of them
as they are unrelated to "normal" functioning.

I can't say "card xyz is good" for two reasons:
 - I don't have experience with anything else than 905B and 905C cards; I
do have other brands in the computers that I manage, but they all worked
more-or-less with the drivers that came with the kernel and their
performance is not critical, so I haven't spent much time "optimizing"
them
 - in some cases (check the archive of the tulip list, for example), cards
keep their name but the actual components are changed to the extent that
they require completely different drivers; that's the reason why I
specified the chipsets in my previous reply

Sincerely,

Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De