Dlink DFE-530TX
Dlink has always stood tall in the networking arena. They have a broad range of products available to suit your networking needs. They sent us the DFE-530 TX NIC to include in our shootout, and it looks to prove the same quality we are used to seeing from Dlink.
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| The Dlink DFE-530TX |
Included in the package are one PCI LAN auto-sensing network card (model DFE-530TX), a nice users manual with an easy setup guide to help you get through the install, and a drivers floppy disk. Right out of the box, the card supports all flavors of Windows: 3.1, 9x, NT, and 2000. The NIC also has Boot-ROM support (ROM sold separate) but does not have the capability of WOL.
The Dlink NIC is somewhat bigger in size than the other NICS mentioned thus far, but installation is much the same as with the other cards. Its larger size should not affect your decision when comparing between the cards, as it should fit in any motherboard.
I thought it a little odd that the 530 TX supported Boot-ROM installation, but didn’t support WOL, because generally these two features come together. Since the two features are actually independent of one another though, the missing WOL support won’t hinder the use of the Boot-ROM.
Dlink included an impressive 4 lights on the back of the NIC. They are Power/Transmit, Link/Receive, Collision, and 10 or 100 Mbit LAN connection. These all come in handy when you are trying to gather information about a certain card or segment of your network, but they also likely boosted up the cost of the card.
Here are the performance scores for the Dlink DFE 530-TX using driver release 6/15/99
Time to transfer files: 2:54
Network utilization: 15%
Frames /sec: 3814-8695
Frames dropped:0
CPU utilization: 75%
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