The Simtec Net100 100bT network cards are out!

The Simtec cards, which will be sold via CTA, R-Comp and Stuart Tyrrell, have been sent in pre-production form to selected reviewers and vendors. So I was a very happy bunny when one dropped on my desk this morning, especially as the Castle card I ordered and was told would be delivered February is already a month late!

Drivers are supplied on Flash memory which can be updated at a later date. The software to update my !Boot sequence and update the Flash actually appeared in the Apps directory, so there's no need to even supply a floppy or CD with software. The new EtherX drivers can then be configured in exactly the same way as existing NICs.

Initial tests show that there's not a great deal of difference on some existing software - for instance I had to change the buffer size on FTPc to get more than 500K/sec on the internal office network, and using Fresco to FTP download gave nearly half that - and ShareFS access has had to be slowed so that it doesn't crash the existing 10bT network. But on LanMan networks you should see a lot more speed, around 2MB/sec, and hopefully we should see programs written to take advantage of the new speed in the future. The fact is that the card is now available (at least to some) - cheaper and more easily available (RSN) than 10bT cards, and I've already found some things such as the Samba server much more stable due to better buffering. At the very least the chips won't pop out like on my Ant card (you'll see why when you get to the comparison photo :)

I've taken some pictures and they're available from here. I'll continue to run some tests to quantify any difference in speed over the old Ant card I used to use!