[SOLVED] Add a network card to Desktop PC which has an integrated one ?

[alanattom]

I hope someone can help an old guy with an old W10 desktop...

We have a W10 Pro desktop. It's 8 years old. It runs fine, and has all the W10 Updates. It has an "Integrated Network Card 10/100 MBPS RJ-45" (the Ethernet cable plugs into it).

We recently replaced our Spectrum cable internet with fiber (1 gig), but various Speed Tests show our Download Speed is only about 580, while the Upload Speed is around 800. The fibre company tech support guy said fiber is usually "50/50" (Upload and Download are approximately equal).

Is our speed typical for 1Gig?

Just a guess, but might our 8-year old "Integrated Network Card" be preventing us from higher (~1 gig) speed? Do we need to replace our Ethernet cable?

Thanks for any help!

Alan

 

[bill001g]

You can't have only a 10/100 card, you would never see more than 100mbps.

The card must be 1gbit. The network itself between your pc and the router is always running at 1gbit. Something else is delaying the packets. The most common on is the internet connection. Do you have another device you can test with and/or does your router have the ability to run speedtest. A lot of the newer fiber routers have speedtest built in.

It could be a network driver but that is highly unlikely. Check the diver level on the ethernet. Best is to get the latest driver from the chipset maker. Window generic drivers tend to have more issues...but not generally slowing the traffic down.

The other thing you could look for is software on the pc that is delaying the traffic. A very common one that comes bundled with motherboards and video cards is so called "gamer" networks software. Any kind of software that does QoS or favors one kind of traffic over another though is a problem. You want to uninstall anything like this. On high speed internet connection these types of software cause a lot of overhead and you can get slower transfer rates.

 

[alanattom]

Thank you, Bill, much appreciated!!

I need to apologize because I may've wasted your time - I realized last night, after my post, that our VPN (NORD) may well be the issue, so I ran the test again with NORD Paused this time, and the speeds were fine (download 925, Upload 935).

(I use https://fiber.google.com/speedtest/ )

A Senior Moment for sure... again I am sorry for that.

Thank you for your help!

Alan

 

[bill001g]

I see the vpn clients are actually getting better. I know when I used to run vpn on my pc itself I never got speeds above about 300mbps. After having to reinstall windows to get rid of a vpn software I started to run vpn on the router which actually is even slower because of the small cpu in a router.

If you are not already running it try to run nord using wireguard rather than openvpn. It tends to take less cpu and therefore get a higher transfer rate.