Update: Production order has been placed for these cards. Approximately one month until production completion, then they need to be tested prior to listing for sale.
This is an upcoming product announcement.
Comm Slot II Ethernet cards have been expensive and hard to find for quite some time now. And as it turns out, Comm Slot II is basically just PCI with fewer signals. Thus, a project was born.
A thread has been started on Tinker Different about these cards: https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/comm-slot-ii-10-100-ethernet-cards.3658/
Farallon produced a 10/100 Comm Slot II card “back in the day”, but it had some compatibility issues and other problems based on old posts at zone6400.com
After spending several weeks looking around for information about Ethernet chipsets and Mac OS compatibility, I found one which is very widely compatible (tested on 7.6 through 9.1) and is a convenient single-chip solution unlike the Farallon which needed the 100 megabit driver separate from the PCI-side controller.
Speeds have been low in testing, unfortunately – only 150k per second max download. But this is the speed I see from PCI cards of the era on my 7300 that’s upgraded with a G3 card. So I’m confused, I expected far better than that from a 10/100 chipset. Not sure if there’s something I am doing wrong in configuration or what.
For your viewing pleasure, the card is pictured below:
