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CNET Pro200

CNet Technologies was founded in 1987 and provides all kinds of hardware networking solutions. Included in this roundup are two of their newest NICs, the Pro200 and Pro 200WL. Both cards have much the same to offer, except the Pro200WL supports WOL technology.

The CNET Pro200

Similar features for both cards include Auto-negotiation with half and full duplex for supporting speeds between 10Mbit/s and 200 Mbit/s, Boot-ROM support, compliancy with PCI 2.2 specs, and an impressive OS driver support list which includes Windows 9X, NT, 2000,Linux, OS/2 warp, and UNIX.

This card uses a Davicom chipset and boasts being able to handle speeds from 10 Mbit/s all the way up to 200 Mbit/s while in full duplex mode. Even though the IEEE specs say CAT 5 cable can’t handle speeds above 100 Mbit/s right now –and I can’t theoretically bench at that speed, it’s definitely worth mentioning, because at speeds that high, things like LAN video, and other multimedia apps become reality.

There is no WOL support with the Pro200, but that can actually make this card more appealing to someone who doesn’t want to pay for features they don’t plan on using. Included with the Pro200 NIC are 3.5” drivers disk and a rather small manual. The NIC has two connectivity lights on the rear, one for Link status, and the other for NIC activity status.

I installed the card perfectly in my Windows NT machine, and after a quick reboot the card was ready for connectivity. There was no additional software included to use with the Pro200.

Here are the performance stats using the latest driver (Ver 1.41B)

Time to transfer files: 3:00
Network utilization: 15%
Frames /sec: 4307-8979
Frames dropped:0
CPU utilization: 71%

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