ISA bus mastering cards will always get contention its unavoidable as
the ISA bus is so incredibly slow. For an ISA bus machine however (with
no power saving stuff involved) they are the fastest cards you'll get.
When I built a high spec 386 machine (thats a while ago) it was built with
a bus mastering SCSI controller (AHA1542), and bus mastering Lance. Under
very heavy disk load the lance lost packets. It still outperformed an NE2000
overall
On PCI DMA bandwidth is very rarely an issue. I've only seen one report
of PCI lance people seeing that message and that was using a frame
grabber from hell writing pretty much raw NTSC video onto a disk array.
> >Thats not unusual if you have a lot of DMA going on. Especially a
> >sound blaster.
> Or perhaps a Triton MB and a fast HD?
Possibly. I would have assumed the triton chipset could multiplex ISA
PCI and its own IDE DMA channels. Maybe it can't
Alan