Hardware ReviewsAccton Cheetah PCI 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Adapter (EN1207D-TX) If you are an experienced home PC networker or feel homePCnetwork and other sites have provided you enough good information (and, of course, we have...) to help you build a network, this Accton Cheetah PCI 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet network interface card (NIC) could be the perfect choice. This card looks well built, installed with ease and performed extremely well. But, it comes packaged as a true "bare bones" card and won't provide much help to anyone who wants or needs instruction. Nevertheless, if you can do without those "frills," this card's positives and outstanding price (we've seen it for an unbelievable $18) make it an excellent choice. Read on. Overview
The Accton Cheetah PCI 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet is a good, solid card. It's one of the smallest we've ever tested, but has all of the major features we now find standard on most cards: PCI interface; 32-bit bus master with low CPU utilization; full-duplex operation; and auto speed detection. The package is a true bare bones package. You get the card and a driver disk in a brown, corrugated box. The disk includes readme files that are not extensive, but they do cover installation on all of the major operating systems including Windows 98/95, NT and Windows for Workgroups. Installation Installation was a breeze. Of course, we can't say it followed along with the installation guide since there wasn't an installation guide. However, since we (and many of you) have been through an NIC installation before, as long as there aren't any problems you really don't need a guide. And that was the case with the Cheetah. During installation on Windows98, we had to point the installation routine to the Win98 subdirectory on the diskette but that's not really a big deal. Once we did that, the routine found the adapter and installation was automatic from there on out. We restarted as instructed and were up and running. Performance Again, our main performance test involves two reads and two writes of a 30 megabyte file. The red bars on the chart below reflect results at the 100Mbps speed and the blue bars reflect results at 10Mbps. Overall, the card averaged 24.41 seconds at 100 speed and 41.24 at 10Mbps. As you may know from comparisons with other cards we've tested, that stacks up to very good performance. In fact, the card is just a bit slower than our Editor's Choice Netgear card at 100Mpbs (24.23) although actually a bit faster at 10Mbps (41.71). Perhaps even more surprisingly, the card beat the 3Com card at 100Mbps (24.90) and the 3Com card retails for three times the price. To be fair to the 3Com card, it did beat the Accton card at 10Mbps (41.11). Of course, no one could detect these performance differences in real world use. Suffice it to say that this Accton card is a solid performer against several other cards at any price.
Summary Overall, the Accton Cheetah card is a good performer at a good price. The only major problem is that the card comes packaged without any of the installation manuals or networking guides that we have come to expect from NICs targeted at home networks. In fact, we have to mark off against the card for that reason. After all, this is homePCnetwork and we judge products based on how well they meet the needs of our web site visitors. Still, if you know all the basics about networking and need a bunch of network cards, don't hesitate to pick up a bunch of these cards. Grade = B+ Details
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