Hardware ReviewsD-Link DFE-910 10/100 Network in a Box Following not long after its DFE-905 Fast Ethernet Kit (a homePCnetwork "Editor's Choice"), D-Link is selling another killer home networking package. The DFE-910 10/100 Network in a Box has some serious improvements over the "older" kit. New features include a pair of more advanced network interface cards (NICs); a higher capacity hub with some new, nifty features (see our separate review of the DSH-5 hub); and an internet-sharing software package. Yet, at a street price of $104 (we found it at Buy.com for that price), the kit sells for less than the DFE-905 kit when we reviewed it late last year. Before you buy any kit for a 10/100 network (meaning it will work with computers and network devices at both Ethernet and Fast Ethernet speeds), make sure to check out the DFE-910. Read on. Overview The DFE-910 kit comes in a large box well labeled for the first-time networker, right down to a small diagram on the box to show you how to insert a PCI card into a motherboard slot.
Inside the box, you'll find:
One other, minor point that we think does bear mentioning. We've had some (fairly strong) comments about the D-Link hubs' included fans. We don't find the sound troublesome (and, in fact, we like the cooling feature of the fan), but some people have sent us notes commenting on it. If you think the sound might bother you, you'll want to look for a hub without a fan. Be prepared, however, to deal with the heat the hub will generate. Installation We plugged the small PCI network card into an open slot on our test machines and, as the included instruction booklet points out, connected the Wake-On-LAN cable to our motherboard through the supplied 3-wire cable. Frankly, we don't see a lot of utility for the WOL on home networks, but we connected the cable to ensure the NIC still worked and because home users may want to leave open the option to use this feature at some point. Next, we plugged one end of the cables into the jacks on the network cards and the other end into an open jack on the hub. Lastly, we plugged in the power brick for the hub. Keep in mind that it is OK to plug and unplug cables from the hub when it is turned on, but you should turn off your computer before inserting or removing cables from its network card. With the hardware installed, we turned on the machine. Windows 98 promptly started the New Hardware Found wizard and automatically searched for the driver. We inserted the supplied diskette and clicked on the box next to "Floppy Drive" so the Wizard would look there for the installation software. The install Wizard recognized the the adapter as a "D-Link DFE-540TX Fast Ethernet PCI Adapter" and, after another click, copied the files it needed from the floppy. As usual, the Wizard then asked for the Windows 98 CD, copied the necessary files and prompted us to restart the machine which we did. After restart, we followed the Quick Starter Guide steps to provide a unique name for each computer and a common workgroup name. We then turned on file and printer sharing and shared a resource on the computers (in our tests, that means sharing the c drive on each computer). Performance Needless to say, this fast Ethernet kit is very quick. In order to better determine the speed of network kits, NICs and hubs, we have changed our testing procedures. In short, we still copy a 30 meg file from one test machine (the Celeron 400 known as T400 or T4 in our setup) to the other (a P2-266 known as T266 or T2) called "writes" and copy it back again, called "reads". (For details, see How We Test.) We reboot the computers when necessary to make sure that caching is not improperly affecting the tests. We now do the tests using TCP/IP, IPX and NetBEUI protocols. We remove the other two while testing each one. We then average the writes under each protocol, average the reads under each protocol and get an overall average speed in seconds for the copy process. Here are what the results looked like for this kit:
As you can see (and as many of you may know), NetBEUI is the fastest protocol. However, keep in mind that NetBEUI will not be helpful for sharing internet access (which is more often based on TCP/IP) or for network games (usually based on IPX). Still if you don't need internet access with TCP/IP or plan to network games, do consider NetBEUI for its speed. For this D-Link kit, then, the NetBEUI transfers of the 30 megabyte file averaged 8.14 seconds. For IPX, the average was 9.41 and for TCP/IP 15.49 seconds. [PLEASE NOTE: You can not compare these test results with any tests prior to August 1999 when we completed the upgrade on our test machines. We plan to upgrade the tests machine only once a year so you should be able to compare results for this test with other reviews through August 2000.] We think this kit performed very well. It most of our tests, we saw the collision light on the hub come on rarely, if at all, and the transfer rates often seemed like we were copying files internally on one machine. Of course, at this point, we can't provide any great comparisons since we have not tested other 10/100 kits on our newly upgraded test machines, but stay tuned for other reviews coming up. We don't like to speculate, but we think it's fair to say that the D-Link kit likely will hold up well against competitive kits. Summary Overall, this is a great kit. D-Link again has put together a nice package, adding some significant pieces over their previous kit that we rated an Editor's Choice. This time, the kit includes better NICs, a better hub with one extra port and an added "switch" feature, and extra software, including the internet sharing software we did not specifically test. AND, D-Link added all of this kit while keeping the price in line with the old kit. That seems to us like a darn good deal. In fact, the only thing keeping us from bestowing another Editor's Choice award is that we want to look at a few other 10/100 kits before claiming that the DFE-910 has it all. Nevertheless, we can't imagine anything is missing. For now, this is the 10/100 kit to beat at homePCnetwork.com. Grade = A Details
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