alt Hacker Newsnetwork cards mostly died when it got integrated into the motherboard - same with soundcards and even graphic cards unless you wanted pro quality sound, extra networking features or a gamer. For everybody else, the basic integrated options were enough. I grew up in that era and not once did I look up what the 3com card offered over another networking card other than 10/100. Just wanted it to work. I'm sure some people are more discerning but not much.
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>not once did I look up what the 3com card offered over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746741
tldr:
"The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made...8139 supports bus-master DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four packets queued for transmission at any one time.
Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol levels.
It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it."
tldr tldr: it didnt matter past 2001 since slowest low end CPUs were cheap enough to nullify all the potential gains from smart good 100Mbit NICs
There were some “interesting” issues with a lot of the cheap hardware for a long time though. A classic example was the WinModem. A fast modem for cheap? Sure! But it was cheap because it outsourced a lot of its processing to the CPU, so if your system was loaded up (in the day when CPUs were almost all single-core) meant there wasn’t enough left over to process inbound data in realtime which meant dropped packets and retries and horrendous lag and throughput.
Standard wisdom was to use an Intel EtherExpress Pro card for a long time after onboard Ethernet was available. Lots of server hardware had unused builtin NICs until they got decent.