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Newegg Barton 2500+ and A7N8X

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DJ2000

Registered
Joined
Dec 13, 2001
Location
USA
Just received a Barton 2500+ and a a7n8x rev 2.0 and right out of the box am running 10 X 200. Great board so far. I am sure I will go higher. Was wondering if anyone has any comments on whether to use the onboard NIC or my trusty 3com 905tx I can't really tell the difference visually.
 
Actually, I would use the onboard NICs (there are two). Then you save a PCI slot and some resources, and you don't need more drivers. I'm assuming you're not too concerned with speed, and there probably isn't much of one. As for the onboard NICs, both of them work flawlessly, and you can even hook them up to the same hub and they won't conflict. One of the NICs is a 3Com, which you should like. It comes with some decent software too.

Just thoughts: What would be interesting is a performance rating of the three NICs, the PCI 3Com, the onboard 3Com, and Nvidia's own nic. I wonder if having both onboards hooked up would increase bandwidth? Or could you link two hubs (networks) with them? :)
 
I use the onboard, and they both work quite well. I use the 3com becasue I think that it has an excelent software program. itim100 Win XP has a load balancing feature for more than one NIC so you should be able to increase your bandwith with both plugged in no problem :)

edit: itim100 if you fool around with the dual onboard NICS post back and let me know how it affected your bandwith
 
The Onboard 3COM is a 3c90X family member (3C902b to be exact) and has performace that's as good as your PCI NIC (but won't load your PCI bus). The built in NVidia NIC is also quite good, and has a lower CPU utilization then the 3COM NIC.
 
I've done some research on this at several forum sites and so far the Nvidia NIC is the prefered one to use. I am about to load everything on to my new Rev2 board and I have a CAD system that uses the NIC card to generate it's license, so I wanted to use the best one of the two.
 
doodah10 said:
I've done some research on this at several forum sites and so far the Nvidia NIC is the prefered one to use. I am about to load everything on to my new Rev2 board and I have a CAD system that uses the NIC card to generate it's license, so I wanted to use the best one of the two.


Cool thing, make sure you write the MAC address on the ASUS board down, if you need to RMA the board, you can plug the old MAC address into the BIOS of the NEW Board
 
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