Best Nubus Network adapter

Unfortunately most of the ones you are going to find are going to be 10Mbit cards.  Make sure you get one that works with twisted pair wiring instead of coax or at least has a connector for an external transciever.  I would guess that 100Mbit NuBus cards are not very common.

There were 100 Mbit/s NuBus network adapters:

• Asanté AsantéFAST 10/100

• Farallon Fast EtherTX-10/100

• DaynaPORT Bluestreak 10/100

• Sonic Systems BD-056

However, it's not too likely that a 40 Mhz 68030 can keep up with such a high data rate. You may not see any advantage over a traditional 10 Mbit Ethernet card.

What does make sense on Macs of this vintage is to use a network card with its own intelligent packet processor. That would mean the Apple Ethernet NB card, with its onboard 68000. This takes load off the main CPU, very noticeable on 68030 machines.

I didn't mean to imply that 100MBit NuBus Ethernet cards didn't exist, just that they probably are more rare than 10MBit ones.  You are probably right about a IIfx probably not seeing a lot of increase in thruput with a 100MBit card vs a 10MBit card.  One reason I'd much rather have a 100MBit card is that these days there are a lot of switches and routers which won't talk at 10MBit anymore, so if you get a 10MBit card you need to make sure the port you are plugging into will work.  I do agree that the smarter cards which offload a lot of functionality in the Ethernet stack from the main CPU are a bigger win for slower machines.

Somewhere around here I've got an extra NuBus Ethernet card, but I don't remember what it is, and I think it was in a box that just got sent to storage while my house is being remodelled.  I also think I've got some in the IIfx and the II that are upstairs, but I'd have to go open those up to find out what they are too.

An option, if your switch doesn't support 10 Mbps devices, is to get a cheap 10/100 hub to act as intermediary. I did that successfully with a client's printer, once.

I wouldn't worry about 10 Mbps feeling too slow on a IIfx.

This one looks compelling: Asante NuBUS Ethernet Card (MC3NB)

$35 shipped for NOS, with onboard 10Base-T.

retro_bill wrote:

Do I need drivers or are they in the OS?

The drivers for that card are called "A/ROSE", "A/ROSE Prep", and "EtherTalk Phase 2" and should be installed by default in System 6 or 7.

The card should work well with your IIfx.

I have a brand new still in the box Apple Token Ring adapter.  LOL!  :-)