Increased performance from 3COM - this is how. (Score 2)

3COM cards in general are faster because of the way they handle things at the packet level. Instead of waiting for an entire packet to come across before accepting it, they look at only the first few bytes of the header and if they're good then pass it through. ie - if you have a bunch of 3COMs on a hub with a large collision domain then you're performace may suck because there are *lots* more short-rounds (short packets 64 bytes). a 3COM won't always catch these. Other than that, there aren't all that many settings to really change in software. So, 3COM may have started doing this in their modems now as well, not only their NICs.