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Asante FriendlyNET 595 Adapter

The Asante FriendlyNET 595

Asante Corporation was founded in 1988, and has had a decent portion of the SOHO and enterprise markets. The FriendlyNET 595 adapter comes to us at the average retail price of just $19.99 –and that makes this NIC the cheapest in the roundup. But will price give way to performance and features?

This NIC is plug and play compatible, and has Auto-negotiation from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s, works in half or full duplex mode, and also includes 32 bit PCI drivers, plus supports Linux, Windows 9X, NT, and 2000.

Looking somewhat tiny, this little NIC came shipped to me in an OEM-type plastic flip open case containing the NIC, one driver floppy, and a fold out features /driver support sheet.

The NIC itself has a RJ 45 female connection and 2 different link lights to show how fast your LAN connection is. (10Mbit or 100 Mbit) and if your card is transmitting or receiving packets.

Installing the NIC was very simple. The only floppy disk included contains a driver for each of the operating systems listed above. The included manual isn’t much of anything, except a small one-fold paper going over the features of the NIC. This documentation definitely wouldn’t be much help if you had any installation issues. In this case the card installed flawlessly, so you wouldn’t need much more than the included written materials.

Using a SIS chipset, the Asante NIC doesn’t have Boot-ROM support (for diskless workstations) nor does it provide WOL (Wake on LAN) –which is the ability of the NIC to send a small signal to the system board telling a suspended or power management PC to “wake up” and come online. Neither of these are widely used features, but if you do plan on using the NIC in a diskless workstation or want the convenience of remotely turning on a computer, then you may want to look into a different NIC solution.

Here are the performance scores for the Asante FriendlyNET 595 Adapter, using driver version 1.11

Time to transfer files: 3:06
Network utilization: 18%
Frames /sec: 4100-9247
Frames dropped:0
CPU utilization: 73%

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