Question Ethernet gives high ping after fresh Windows reinstall

Jan 10, 2025
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Hello,

I've been on windows 11 for a couple of months now and decided yesterday to downgrade back to windows 10 as I prefer it for various reasons. However, when I did this, I noticed that my ethernet connection's ping suddenly spiked by 75-100% (for example, to a server in Chicago it went from ~25-30 to ~45-50). When I use wifi though, my ping is similar to what it used to be, so I'm not really sure why this issue would only affect ethernet.

My network card is a Realtek 2.5GbE card, which comes built-in with my mobo, the Z690 AORUS ELITE AX (rev. 1.3).

I tried installing drivers from Gigabyte's support page for the motherboard and even upgrading to windows 11 again thinking it might be something related to the OS and the driver version it uses, but no success.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, thanks a lot! :)
 
Extremely strange. Ping time is either distance related or the data is being held in some buffer, normally dues to contention. The ethernet cable itself sends data at some fixed percentage of the speed of light and is almost to tiny to calculate even if you used a the 100 meter maximum ethernet cable.

In theory the driver could be holding the data but it should be well under 1ms for the code to execute. 20ms is massive when you consider how much instructions a CPU can execute in that time. Even VPN encryption does not add that kind of delays.

You would only see those massive delays when data is being queued. Most times this would be on some router that had more data to send than would fit into the outgoing connection.

The only way I can think that your pc would have data queued in a buffer is if there it was some kind of artificial software thing. Is there any software related to QoS running. Some kind of so called "gamer" traffic favoring thing maybe. A common name is cfosspeed. Not sure about giabyte but asus is know for installing that kind of software with the bloatware that comes with the motherboard software. The also have it in their video card bloatware,

I would assume if you ping the router IP itself or maybe another pc in your lan you still get 1 or 2 ms. This would also indicate some kind to artifical software thing. The network itself has no concept of what IP address is inside the packet. A ping packet to say 8.8.8.8 is exactly the same as a ping packet to the router ip like 192.168.1.1. Both are a bunch of binary "stuff" and the only part that is used if the mac address in the front of the packet. Both ping packets are being sent to the mac address of the router. Once they get to the router the router looks inside and decides if it needs to send the data out to the internet or if in this case it processes the data and responds itself. Traffic going back to the pc is similar it is all done with mac addresses.

Although it would likely just confirm what you already know maybe boot a linux USB distribution. The ping time from this has all the same hardware in the path as windows. I suspect it will be fine and you back at what is windows doing.