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Starting from the top, the Adaptec card showed it’s 64-bit ready chipset strength here by only using 67% of the CPU when doing the 300MB folder transfers. This, paired with the high transfer speeds makes for a very efficient, high performance card. Coming in just a little over 70% is the CNet PRO200. This card showed average scores in the time slots, but it did seem to keep the CPU workload at more of a minimum. The next score is rather interesting as well, the FriendlyNET PCI 595 was the lowest scoring card in timed transfers, but managed to keep the CPU at 73%, making this a fairly efficient card as well. The CNET Pro200WL, and Netgear FA310TX managed to take 74% of the CPU power during their tests, but looking back to the time scores, the CPU utilization for these two card were fairly consistent with the data scores. Coming in at an average of 75% CPU utilization is the D-link FDE-530TX card and the Linksys NC100. The D-link card score here was consistent with the time score, in being it was eating an average amount of CPU cycles to provide it’s data throughput, but the Linksys NC100 defiantly ate up more CPU cycles to achieve it’s higher scores in the data throughput arena.

So the clear performance winner here would be the Adaptec card, showing that it’s fast data throughput won’t impact the CPU with a high load, and with the capability of having a 64 bit connection, I’m sure scores would have even been better.

Between both of the scores for time, and CPU utilization, there really wasn’t much of a variance. Although the FriendlyNET card didn’t transfer files quit as fast, it did show it was slightly more efficient when doing its file transfers. And even though the Linksys card gave us the fastest data transfer –it fell slightly behind in CPU utilization when compared to other NICS. Since the scores were SO close between all the NICs, we need to look into other performance criteria to determine which card can be called an overall winner, right? Well I wish we could –but the other performance scores for frames dropped, network utilization, and frames/sec didn’t vary enough to differentiate each card from the other. But if one was to say –who was the fastest, then obviously we would have to say the Linksys LNE 100TX. But if you wanted to know which card was more efficient, we would have to say the Adaptec ANA-62011TX. And if you were to look at which card provided the best performance to CPU usage ratio, without costing a lot, it would be the Cnet PRO200.