Question New network card doesn't work ?

[AshBerry984]

Hi! my little one yanked the wired connection from my pc and I my onboard network adapter has been having issues. So I went to the store and bought a TP-Link TX201 network card. When I installed it on my motherboard I only had one spare PCIe 4.0 x16 slot as my video card was taking up the other one. I was told that it would work if I plugged it into that, but when I turned the PC on the new card doesn't light up or show up on my PC. Would anyone be able to help?

I have a Rog Strix X870-F Gaming WiFi motherboard but the WiFi on it is iffy sometimes.

 

[bill001g]

You likely need to load a driver.

Check the device manager and see if you can see any device that might be under the network tab. Many times you will find a device that has some kind of error condition. You generally see this even if there is something wrong with drivers.

Likely there is some kind of instruction that tells how to load the driver that came with the nic card. Be nice if they actually included the drivers but few people have CD anymore and I guess a small memory stick is too costly or something. They generally have a link to their web site that shows exactly where to get the driver at.

 

[Ralston18]

Driver install - yes.

Also, try using another known working Ethernet cable.

 

[AshBerry984]

Now the issue is the lights are blinking on the network card but the PC says the Ethernet cable isn't connected. The cords are are both working as they were both plugged into the Xbox and ps5

 

[bill001g]

Are you sure it is not confused by the ethernet card built into the motherboard. If you can try to disable the onboard ethernet in the bios. It really should not matter you could if they were working run both ethernet ports with careful configuration.

Ethernet is mostly a hardware thing especially when it comes to the speed and detection of cables. There are almost no setting but I guess you could verify that anything you can see in the ethernet port nic settings are using the defaults.

In general I would have always suspected the cables first. It is very easy to damage a ethernet cable compared to a port. It would be nice if a ethernet cable would just completely fail but the more common issue with a bad cable is they can randomly work, run at the wrong speed, and work on some machine but not others.

I would buy a new cable, they are cheap for short ones and it is always nice to have a spare. Key here is to avoid all the fake cables being sold. The most common ones are those flat cables which have wire much too thin to meet the standards for ethernet cables. You want pure copper wire with wire size 22-24. If you can not find that information buy from another vendor.