This letter presents a simple but accurate analytical model to evaluate the throughput of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function in non-saturated conditions. The influence of offered load on the throughput of both basic and RTS/CTS access mechanisms are analyzed and compared. It's shown that basic access scheme can achieve the same maximal throughput as that of RTS/CTS mechanism in non-saturated conditions while the latter is robust to the number of contending stations compared to basic mechanism. The analytical results are validated by extensive simulations.