Hardware ReviewsSMC EZ Card 10/100 Fast Ethernet PCI Card
Another low cost Fast Ethernet card. We picked up ours for $29.95 on sale at CompUSA. (OK..so CompUSA is one of our favorite stores. You only get 10 days to make sure hardware works, but it's better than putting it back in the mail from mail order or on-line stores). Overview This is a good, inexpensive card that provides both 10Mbps and 100Mbps. That's important because home PC networks likely are using 10Mbps technology now, but will move to 100Mbps once the price of Fast Ethernet hubs drops a bit more. (Right now the difference between a 4 or 8 port Ethernet and Fast Ethernet hub can be $100. I expect that to disappear in the next 6 months). So buy this card and use it with a 10Mbps hub now, and be ready to move up later. SMC is a good name and this card seems to reflect that quality. Installation Installation under Windows 98 was fairly smooth. The manual provides some detail on installing under Windows and a lot of detail about using the included DOS utility if you need to change settings. Still, there was nothing on setting up Windows for network protocols, file sharing, etc. That would be nice for an NIC obviously aimed at home users. The plug n play "Add New Hardware Wizard" started automatically after we installed the card and looked for the best drivers. After we inserted the supplied diskette and pointed the dialog box to it, the Wizard automatically installed a "SMC EZ Card 10/100." The only thing that bugged us, was after inserting the floppy and getting the correct card IDed, the install program looked for the drivers somewhere else and we had to AGAIN point it to the floppy drive. I'm not sure this is SMC's fault; it may be a Windows problem since other install programs do this. Upon restart, our test machine took a LONG time to reboot, but it finally did. Performance Our main performance test, at this point, involves two reads and two writes of a 30 megabyte file. On all four tests, the SMC card averaged 35.41 seconds in 10Mbps mode and 12.13 in 100Mbps mode.
Summary Overall, this appears to be a good card for the money. Folks new to networking may want a better manual with more comprehensive discussions of how to actually get a network setup and to the point where you can share files and peripherals. But, if you don't need that type of support, this is a good, inexpensive card. Grade = B Details
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