[SOLVED] Realtek 2.5Gbe network card is limited to 200Mbps ?

[RoyL666]

I'm rapidly losing the will to live. I installed a new netwok card into my main PC to make use of the 2.5GbE fibre network I've installed. The card is connected to a 2.5GbE switch with a CAT6E cable (2 metres) which is connected via fibre to the router. I have a second PC which is connected to the same router which gets an Internet speed of 510Mbps ( I have 500Mbps fibre broadband). However, the first machine only reaches 210Mbps if I'm lucky. If the properties for the card I have Speed & Duplex set to Auto Negotiation & EEE Max Support Speed to 2.5Gbps Full Duplex. I've also downloaded and installed the latest drivers for Windows 11. Help!

 

[kanewolf]

I'm rapidly losing the will to live. I installed a new netwok card into my main PC to make use of the 2.5GbE fibre network I've installed. The card is connected to a 2.5GbE switch with a CAT6E cable (2 metres) which is connected via fibre to the router. I have a second PC which is connected to the same router which gets an Internet speed of 510Mbps ( I have 500Mbps fibre broadband). However, the first machine only reaches 210Mbps if I'm lucky. If the properties for the card I have Speed & Duplex set to Auto Negotiation & EEE Max Support Speed to 2.5Gbps Full Duplex. I've also downloaded and installed the latest drivers for Windows 11. Help!

It may depend on the network hardware (switch / router) you have. Some routers have issues when you have such a large mis-match between LAN speed (2.5GE) and WAN speed (500Mbit). One thing you could check is to see if you can enable flow control on the router. That may allow things to work more efficiently.

 

[RoyL666]

It may depend on the network hardware (switch / router) you have. Some routers have issues when you have such a large mis-match between LAN speed (2.5GE) and WAN speed (500Mbit). One thing you could check is to see if you can enable flow control on the router. That may allow things to work more efficiently.

I did think of that, however the second PC, A Dell Optiplex, connects OK. The port that my Asus is connected to is showing 2.5Gbps, The switch is unmanaged and has two sfp ports which auto-negotiate from 1Gbps up to 10Gbps. The ethernet ports can handle from 10Mbps right up to 2.5Gbps so there shoul be no issue there. I also tried connecting via a managed gigabit ethernet switch and get the same problem

 

[kanewolf]

I did think of that, however the second PC, A Dell Optiplex, connects OK. The port that my Asus is connected to is showing 2.5Gbps, The switch is unmanaged and has two sfp ports which auto-negotiate from 1Gbps up to 10Gbps. The ethernet ports can handle from 10Mbps right up to 2.5Gbps so there shoul be no issue there. I also tried connecting via a managed gigabit ethernet switch and get the same problem

I would look to see if flow control is available on the Asus router. It would be a buffering issue on the router.
It could still be a Windows problem. I would get a portable Linux on a thumb drive and boot that to test. Eliminate Windows as a possible problem.
Did your motherboard come with any "game enhancer" software? Something like Asus game first software? That software will artificially limit speedtest.

 

[RoyL666]

I would look to see if flow control is available on the Asus router. It would be a buffering issue on the router.
It could still be a Windows problem. I would get a portable Linux on a thumb drive and boot that to test. Eliminate Windows as a possible problem.
Did your motherboard come with any "game enhancer" software? Something like Asus game first software? That software will artificially limit speedtest.

I think that the router and switch can be discounted as the Optiplex doesn't have the issue. I also tried my Draytek 2866 and got the same result on both machines. I want to get this fixed as I want to go up to Gigabit broadband and its pointless if my development server (the Asus) won't even get near to the 500Mbps that I have. The driver for getting the bandwidth as high as possbile is purely down to being able to download software & patches faster - some are well over 1 gigabyte in size. As it's a development machine the are no games installed or any softwware relating to games (Steam, etc.) - apart from MS solitaire for whilst a download/upload is running.

 

[bill001g]

The software he is referring to you might not even know you installed. A number of motherboards and video cards (Asus is largest offender) will install a so called gaming accelerator with the bloatware they install with the drivers unless you go in and uncheck the install options. It is just one of the common offenders that cause issues like this you may not have it.

How are you testing the speed. Does it only show this issue on speedtest or do you also see issues downing files. Have you tried multiple browsers.

The goal now is to see if it is a hardware issue or maybe a windows setting or driver. As recommend by kanewolf you can try a bootable linux image on a USB stick. These generally have a browser pre installed so you can run the same speedtest.

You could also load a very old line mode tool called IPERF on both your machines. This tool is extrenely basic. It is not affected by things like browers. It pretty much tests the driver and the hardware and is not affected by much else since it uses almost no cpu or gpu. If both you machines are 2.5g and you have 2.5g ports or faster on all equipment between you can actually see close to 2.5g transfer rates using this tool.

Does it work any different if you intenionally plug it into a 1gbit port. 2.5g still tends to be rather flaky for some reason.

 

[cruisetung]

As suggested, use Linux to test the speed, see if it's Windows' problem.

 

[Guidance]

I have the same issue with the same network adapter: an MSI X670E Tomahawk.
Wi-Fi is 700 Mbps, but Ethernet is 250 or 350 Mbps at times.
Speedtest sometimes shows 600 Mbps, but Fast.com is stuck at 250–350.
Changing the auto negotiation to 1 Gbps won't change anything.

 

[BFG-9000]

As with the terrible ASUS WTFast Game Accelerator (yes, that really is its actual name) Bill mentioned, MSI Dragon Center includes a less obviously named accelerator called Lan Manager which has an uninstaller in the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI\One Dragon Center\LanManager

 

[BFG-9000]

The MSI Lan Manager component that causes the issues is cFosSpeed Traffic shaping, which can also be installed separately under the name "Gigabyte Speed"

 

[Guidance]

The MSI Lan Manager component that causes the issues is cFosSpeed Traffic shaping, which can also be installed separately under the name "Gigabyte Speed"

i dont have this or any msi software installed

 

[Guidance]

I just fixed the problem, the WIFI was normal only the ethernet was capped at 250mbs.
I put Unbuntu on the pen drive and ran it to see if I had the problem or if it was the network cable, router / adapter

and the internet was normal on unbuntu, then I started installing various drivers and none fixed it.

I found someone recommending a software called TCPOptimizer, according to him it left the internet with less latency.

To be clear, I've never used this software and certainly not with windows 11 or the current installation.

I didn't use TCPOptimizer to optimize anything, but when I started the program it was clear that I had a lot of settings that weren't standard Windows settings, so I used the program to set the Windows settings and not optimize anything.

I restarted the computer and everything is normal, 750 mbs / 350 mbs.

the only program I have installed that could have affected this is exitlag, maybe it was it, or some Windows update.

 

[bill001g]

It very well could be exitlag program.

First no matter what you do on your computer you can not reduce the ping or lag. You can not affect the actual path data takes once it leaves your house. You have 1 and only 1 option you send and receive all data on the connection to your house, anything past that all the various ISP are in control.

The narrow case exitlag can help is say your ISP has a poor connection to a game company server farm location. Exitlag and other similar vpn services buy optimum connection to some gaming data centers. So if you play on that data center "AND" most important the latency to exitlag servers is good on your ISP you might get better response times.

The problem is like any vpn software there is a lot of overhead. Even if it ignores the data and does not pass it via the vpn tunnel the software must look at every packet. It "should" in theory at least not slow down the traffic becaues the CPU in your machines is so fast. If you were to do this on your router you many times bottleneck it unter 100mbps beecause of the small cpu.