A couple of Nubus cards

[Quadraman]

Picked up an Asantefast 10/100 ethernet and a Radius 24 bit accelerated video card. Not sure what model the video card but I know it's not a Thunder GX. It could be a Thunder GT, though, because it has a socket on it that I think is what the DSP board from the GX plugs into. I only paid $70 for the pair and that included shipping. Those are going in the 840AV when they all get here.

 

[ppuskari]

You'll love that Asante 10/100 card.

I got extremely lucky about 5 years ago on ebay and bought like 10 of them for about a dollar a piece plus 25 shipping. I've got one in nearly all my nubus machines now. The sad part is that they come up in 100mb mode, but depending on your Mac, you will most likely NEVER see anywhere near 100mbt throughput on them for all the obvious reasons.

Your 840AV should at least get you 25 to 30 mbps however which is definitely faster than the 10mbps it would normal use. If you happen to NOT get the driver floppy with yours, just pm me. I definitely have them.

Congrats!

 

[Unknown_K]

I think the 10/100 cards are full duplex (send and recieve at the same time), so in server use they will be much faster then the old 10mb ones.

 

[ppuskari]

Yes indeed they are full duplex. The Asante utility that ships with it shows it as well. Asante was always a class act as far as I can remember.

Yeah, my standards are pretty high, but if you go in with the thought that it's not going to be at the high end but with a realistic number set to go by, you will still be very happy with these cards. Then again I just spent the last 2 days trying to get the full 3 Gig/sec out of our IBM Z10 Mainframe OSA card setup. It can be done, but not without jacking the dispatcher priority of the tcp engine that controls it. Hello political nightmare at work

Macs are just so much easier to deal with!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

. . . Then again I just spent the last 2 days trying to get the full 3 Gig/sec out of our IBM Z10 Mainframe OSA card setup. It can be done, but not without jacking the dispatcher priority of the tcp engine that controls it. Hello political nightmare at work
Macs are just so much easier to deal with!

HeHeHe! :lol: I think I've got a NuBus Token Ring Card for interfacing with an IBM Mainframe . . .

. . . how'd something like THAT go over at work? )

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yes indeed they are full duplex. The Asante utility that ships with it shows it as well. Asante was always a class act as far as I can remember.
Yeah, my standards are pretty high, but if you go in with the thought that it's not going to be at the high end but with a realistic number set to go by, you will still be very happy with these cards. Then again I just spent the last 2 days trying to get the full 3 Gig/sec out of our IBM Z10 Mainframe OSA card setup. It can be done, but not without jacking the dispatcher priority of the tcp engine that controls it. Hello political nightmare at work

Macs are just so much easier to deal with!

Z/Architecture! Love it!

If I can't get one of the Asantes, I like the Farallon EtherWaves. The built-in hub is a nice touch.

 

[Unknown_K]

. . . Then again I just spent the last 2 days trying to get the full 3 Gig/sec out of our IBM Z10 Mainframe OSA card setup. It can be done, but not without jacking the dispatcher priority of the tcp engine that controls it. Hello political nightmare at work
Macs are just so much easier to deal with!

HeHeHe! :lol: I think I've got a NuBus Token Ring Card for interfacing with an IBM Mainframe . . .

. . . how'd something like THAT go over at work? )

Do you have the original software for those Tokenring NUBUS cards? I have 2 cards that I want to connect into a Tokenring setup along with a NOVEL server and some old IBM PS/2 systems.

 

[ppuskari]

I would love to get a couple Token Ring Nubus cards some day.. I could connect them to the ring with the Shiva gear I have. Yeah, fire up a TSO session over the Token Ring to our legacy VMS parition on the Z. That would be really neat.

Alternatively it would be neat to fire up Hercules (OS 390) simulator for PC, and the connect to that locally with a pci token ring card and the nubus token card....

Rumor has it a P4 3gig machine ~ 5 MIPS mainframe :rambo:

I see them on ebay from time to time but I never actually bought any.

 

[beachycove]

Does the Asantefast 10/100 offer similar advantages over motherboard ethernet as it does over the more lowly nubus ethernet cards (i.e., full duplex as well as 25-30mbs)?

 

[ppuskari]

From my experience using the cards to date, the answer is yes. They really are nice cards and the drivers do provide a benefit. I have this odd ball BlueStreak 10/100 by Dayna that seems to perform very similar in speed to the Asante 10/100 as well in Nubus machines.

The onboard ethernet depending on the mac gives you flexibility in physical media however. IE UTP, TP, or COAX. the Asante is a UTP copper only if that makes any difference at all to you.

The full duplex feature is very nice and like said below in a server usage it makes a very noticeable improvement.

A few years ago I used one of these cards with a few Radius Rockets and the small http server to fake load balance requests over Appletalk endpoints on each Radius card and was able to get 35mbps burst out of the setup and 200 hits/sec to small htm pages hosted on each card split.

The Mac IIX host machine was a toaster however there was so much heat coming from the cards in that box. BUT it worked and pretty much stressed the NUBUS buss to the max internally (Radius cards communicate via Appletalk internally to the host) as well as the outbound/inbound tcp on the Asante card.

 

[Quadraman]

Does the Asantefast 10/100 offer similar advantages over motherboard ethernet as it does over the more lowly nubus ethernet cards (i.e., full duplex as well as 25-30mbs)?

I don't know about any other advantages, I only grabbed it because the Asantefast is one of only a few 10/100 cards made for Nubus Macs and the auction was ending. The price was also about 1/3 of what they normally go for. I've used 10baseT dongles through the AAUI port on some Macs and the built in 10baseT port on others and the internet connection speed isn't very satisfying though it is passable for direct Mac to Mac connections. I thought the fastest 68k Mac should have the fastest internet connection possible. I intend to do a lot of downloading of 68k software and web pages and building my own personal archive in case some of it disappears from the web one day and is unrecoverable. I may use the accelerated video card in my Quadra 700 instead of the 840AV. The built in video in the 840AV is a lot faster than the 700 to start with and the 700 is not as expandable so it needs the help more than the 840AV though I may move it to the 840AV from time to time if I ever have a need for a second monitor. I'm going to try to find the VRAM SIMMS for the 840AV and see how upgrading helps the video before I decide.

Oh and I think now the video card is a Precisioncolor variant of some type. Does anyone know how to identify the different cards by the part number on the board or maybe by the components mounted on the board? I have looked for a list of Radius part numbers but can't find one and I thought maybe one of you here might have compiled one for your own use that you haven't made public yet.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

HeHeHe! :lol: I think I've got a NuBus Token Ring Card for interfacing with an IBM Mainframe . . .. . . how'd something like THAT go over at work? )

Do you have the original software for those Tokenring NUBUS cards? I have 2 cards that I want to connect into a Tokenring setup along with a NOVEL server and some old IBM PS/2 systems.

Nope! No software at all, but a LOT of the NuBus Cards from that era had all the drivers/software necessary right in the Card's ROM! [] ]'>

 

[Quadraman]

The video card arrived today. It turns out to be a PrecisionColor Pro 24XK.

http://lowendmac.com/video/radiuspro24xk.html

It's not bad, not the fastest nubus accelerator or the highest resolution and no DSP's for Photoshop, but it can do 1152 x 870 in 24 bit color faster than the onboard video in most nubus machines and some other video upgrade cards.

 

[Quadraman]

Got the 10/100 card today. It is brand new in the box. The instructions haven't even been out of the bag! Got the disk and even the warranty registration card! The video card also looked new when it arrived but wasn't in the original box and no driver or instructions. The seller is a liquidator and probably got a bulk deal on them unboxed when Radius stopped making them.

 

[ppuskari]

Before you forget to do it at all. Make a disk image of that Asante driver disk. I can't tell you how many times I've started out looking for one of my driver disks that I actually took out of that odd plastic covering they have on them. I still think what Asante shipped that disk in is more of a static risk than just leaving it bare.

Then I remember I made a disk image on the server then just mount the image after connecting with onboard ether and off to races with ShrinkWrap.

Good conquest!