Opinion: Asante or Farallon?

[krye]

I need to buy a nic for my CC. Both Asante and Farallon nics are easily available on eBay. I was just wondering who makes the better nic, Asante or Farallon? If there is such a thing as "better". Is one more preffered over the other?

[ClassicHasClass]

I have used, and like, both.

[spiceyokooko]

They're both much the same to be honest. I've bought and used products from both company's and never had any problems with either.

Out of personal preference and given the choice, I'd go for Farallon. Probably for the simple reason you tend to stick with what you know best and I've used a number of Farallon products in the past (more than Asanté) and have always been happy with their reliability, ease of installation and use.

I don't think you'll go wrong with either.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Agreed on the reliability and quality issues.

Which company has better support for downloading drivers for legacy hardware? That'd be the only difference there might be between the two choices that I can think of offhand.

[Charlieman]

It is just an LC PDS NIC card, I'm afraid. Farallon probably contracted the design and manufacture. Assante may have designed it in house. Wherever it was designed, you should assume that the designers tried to do a good job.

There are half a dozen other brands that you might recognise. I use a Sonic for the LC PDS NIC because I know that it works and flies. One gotcha is to use an early card in an LC III or later.

[krye]

You could say the same thing about Dell vs Apple. I'm sure Dell tries to do a good job. But if you had to pick between the two? It's a no-brainer. AMD vs Intel. Nvidia vs ATi, etc etc. That was what I was getting at. These seem to be the two most popular brands. I just wanted to know if one was "the other guy".

[trag]

They both had very good reputations in their day, as far as I could tell. I think Asante may have been a little bigger, but I'm not certain. Certainly, the Asante gear seems to have been more commonly available on the used market.

[Charlieman]

The Nvidia vs ATi comparison is a good one. For a brief window of time, one of the two will be slightly ahead in terms of performance or production quality; and both companies have their bad times. But for an LC PDS NIC, any "big brand" will be good enough. The Sonic that I mentioned was used as an Apple reference design; somebody at Apple commissioned an LC PDS NIC for third party companies to copy.

If you want to research which card works best on paper, the important design parameter is cache size versus TCP/IP MTU.

[LCGuy]

I'm a Farallon guy myself....mostly because I've found them to be more reliable in my experience, but also - from memory, they'll just plug straight into any LAN without having to stick a 10MBps hub in between.

[spiceyokooko]

The Sonic that I mentioned was used as an Apple reference design;

Wasn't Sonic bought out by Farallon?