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Carlito Austin

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Aug 2, 2024, 10:55:15 PM8/2/24

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I have a five lan card 3com 3C905B-TX ( 3Com 40-0483-004 ) currently working well in 32bit Operating system we have some software license on mentioned lan card MAC Addresses now i am facing problem when we are going to 64bit Windows XP Operating system, or Windows7 . 64bit OS Required Driver of mentioned lan card, i have search driver on internet but unfortunately fail to find out . pleas help me to provide 64bit Windows XP and Windows 7 Driver of 3com 3C905B-TX ( 3Com 40-0483-004 ). Best Regrads

Has anyone run a comparison between 3Com 3c905-tx, 3c905b-tx, 3c905c-tx PCI network cards on older systems, like K5-era systems? I'm considering putting one of these in my K5 build, and I have all 3 variants. The original 3c905 has the most components on the board, which I'm guessing the 3c905b integrated into a single chip. The only obvious difference I can see with the cards is that the 905B and 905C have the WOL connector. I remember reading in a post that the 3c905c-tx runs slower on slow systems, but I haven't validated this. Anyone have first hand experience with these 3 variants? Thanks!

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I've run my own benchmarks on these cards and also added the Intel Pro 100 S. There is a clear winner from the tests. I'll try to get the results posted sometime this weekend. I ran LAN Speed Test v2 in Win95 and NT4.

Attached are the results for the one Intel and three 3Com cards. The oldest 100mbit 3Com card (3c905) was the clear winner in these tests, followed by the newer 3c905B and Intel Pro100S, with the 3c905C taking the tail. 8 tests were run per network card to formulate an average. Multiple operating systems were used with two points initiating the queries.

On the data table you will also see two non-NIC benchmarks being run: GLQuake and CPUMark99. I ran these with an idle system to see if the mere presence of different NIC's were causing the computer to be slower. GLQuake shows a consistent decrease in benchmark results when the 3c905B or 3c905C were inserted.

In the past, I've noticed that CPUMark99 is rather sensitive to USB and LAN cards on the bus slowing down benchmark results. The 3c905c showed the most performance hit of about 9% compared to the card with the least performance penalty, which was the original 3c905.

Interesting, I have around 10 of those 3c905b cards that have just accumulated over the years, and one thing I notice Is there are bunch of revisions. I wonder if revisions of 3c905b have difference in speed. In adition i have a couple cards that are 3c905b-txnm without wake on lan, both are differn't board revisions.

As for the HW checsum ( Scatter/gather and TX checksums) is not meant to be improving throughput. It is a kind of processing speed/throughput tradeoff. It can only improve TX and only if using specific kinds of system calls (depending on if the data needs to be copied to the user space or not). This should be working also on 905B (Cyclone ASIC) too.

The original 905 hardware (Boomerang ASIC) preserved a legacy PIO/DMA transfer modes which was meant to be a workaround for old flawed PCI chipsets with broken PCI bus master support.The "B" and subsequent revision eliminated that and use bus-master transfers exclusively. In some cases (like large transfers) the simple DMA mode might actually deliver a better throughput (although that's inferior in any "normal" use case). Could that be somehow enabled in your 905?

For my purposes, which mostly consist of benchmarking, I find the drop in CPUMark99 scores most disturbing. Because of this, I will be avoiding the use of 3c905c and 3c905b cards and stick with 3c905 and Intel Pro 100S cards in these slower systems.

The "B" and subsequent revision eliminated that and use bus-master transfers exclusively. In some cases (like large transfers) the simple DMA mode might actually deliver a better throughput (although that's inferior in any "normal" use case). Could that be somehow enabled in your 905?

I'm not sure. I don't see anything in the DOS config or Windows utility to explicitly indicate DMA/PIO modes. I have network optimisation set to Normal on all cards and media type to "auto select (N-Way)". Screenshot provided.

- 2 KB transmit FIFO and 2 KB receive FIFO
- dual-channel DMA engine
- improved scatter-gather engine that reduces the number of I/O operations required to support data transfers.
- hw checksums
- bigger multicast filter
- support for VLANs
- much improved boot ROM support
- improved PCI commands incl. ability to do bursts that are double in size compared to 905
- and several new commands that could be used by driver

Any particular reason you want to know this information? My objective of this thread was just for selecting a network card for my K5 build rather than undertaking a full-on PCI NIC comparison for older systems. I may have a few other brands of PCI network cards if these results are something of importance to you.

EDIT: I have more than a dozen of the D-LINK and Intel cards. I went looking through the Intel cards and nearly all were 82550EY, but I found a 82550GY and a GD82559. Any idea what the differences are?

The 3c905C is keyed for both 5V PCI and 3.3V PCI slots - there are two notches in the card edge connector instead of just one. This is relevant on server boards and certain embedded boards with 3.3V PCI slots, but essentially every desktop motherboard has 5V PCI slots.

With a name like 3com behind this card you know you can expect nothing buy the best quality and performance, and this card is no exception. This 3C905B Network Card definitely meets up to these standards, but at around $100 it's a little more expensive than it's competition.

This NIC performs great, and while utilizing the 32-bit and 3com's Parallel Tasking? II, you get great network throughput with minimum strain on your precious CPU. The 3c905b is an auto-sensing 10/100 Base-T card that utilizes Ethernet technology. This card automatically detects the speed of the hub/switch of your network and adjusts its speed accordingly. We did encounter a large number of collisions when I transferred a large number of MP3's (1GB+) a few weeks back, but that is pretty normal for such a large number of files. Normally, very few collisions occur for normal traffic with this card.

3com's Network Interface Cards are well supported under the Linux OS, and they have even started contributing to the drivers themselves. Support for this card is already in the Kernel and installation is simply a matter of compiling the driver into your kernel or loading the module. It's THAT SIMPLE. For this review we used the 3c59x.o driver located within the Kernel source. 3com has also released it's own driver which is released under the GNU Public License.

I've been using a number of the 3C905B-TX cards in my home network for a while and they are phenomenal. I have yet to encounter any problem with them and in fact, they are in all of my x86 machines. These bad boys have displayed a rock solid performance so far.