Netgear FA 310TX Fast Ethernet
Anyone who has ever worked on or around networks has probably heard the name Netgear mentioned at one time or another. They have been providing all types of networking solutions for years, and had always stood for great performance at a small price. For the roundup, Netgear provided their FA 310TX Fast Ethernet card.
Heres whats included with the 310TX package-
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| The Netgear FA 310TX Fast Ethernet |
One Netgear FA 310TX 10/100 auto-sensing NIC, a quick setup guide and manual, and a driver on floppy supporting Windows 3.11, 9x, NT, 2000, Unix, and Linux. There is NO Boot-ROM support, and NO WOL support.
Installing the FA 310 TX card is you guessed it, simple and quick and Netgear doesnt include any additional software or utilities with this NIC.
This card, like the D-link, is just a shade bigger than the other PCI cards in the shootout, but this wont be a problem, since the other cards were actually under-sized when compared to other expansion boards.
The 310TX features a comprehensive set of five at a glance LEDs on the rear of the card. They are Link status, full/half duplex, 10 or 100 Mbit connection, traffic activity, and collision. Thats a wide array of lights to look at, and as always will help you determine your network status without the aid of additional software. The addition of the extra diag lights might have made the card a little costly though.
Since this particular NIC doesnt support WOL or Boot-ROM , I thought the average price of $27 was a bit high, but the Netgear card carries a lifetime warranty, and a good support.
Here are the performance scores for the Netgear FA 310TX using driver version 4.02
Time to transfer files: 2:53
Network utilization: 16%
Frames /sec: 43134-6823
Frames dropped:0
CPU utilization: 74%
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