Question Why the dif in speed?

[dverdier]

I have an old HP with the Holly-2. That has a 1gbs on board network adapter in it. I upgraded the cpu and ram to max at amd 3080k and 8gb. I just built a computer with a b650 aorus pro ax motherboard with on board 2.5gb link speed and a ryzen 9 7950x 128gb ram. I don't know how to find the link speed on my laptop but its got an i78565u and 32gb. If it's got all that it has to have at least a 1gbs adapter in it. Both newer machines are running win10 and speed test at about 100mbs while the old hp with win 7 can hit around 500. My isp supposedly provides gig speed internet. I'm happy with the 500, but for the life of me I can't figure out why my two newer machines can't get close to that. Any thoughts?

 

[bill001g]

Click on the network Icon and look at the status display. Microsoft has changed this a bit on different versions and patch levels of windows so it is hard to tell you exactly where to look. You should see the connect speed.
It should say 1gbit or 1000mbps. If you see 100mbps then it is highly likely you have a bad cable.

The 2.5g ports are much less tollerant of cables that are out of spec. In addition massive amounts of fake cable is being sold. You see lots of the flat cable that has wires too small to be certified as a actual ethernet cable. It could though be a simple defective cable even if it was a quality cable.

You only need cat5e cables but they must be pure copper (no cca) and have wire size 22-24...that flat stuff is 30 or 33. Higher number is thinner.

 

[dverdier]

I made them all myself. I had 2 coming back from the router one to this room and the other to another room. I brought the one out of the other room and I couldn't get more than 100 +- from it in the two newer systems. It has been stepped on a thousand times so I got rid of that one and made 3 new ones out of the box. I bought a switch recently to cut down on cables and figured what better day. So I used the one that was on the old machine and doing good to feed the switch. The new ones are pretty short compared to the one that feeds. They're cat 5e 24awg. The only dif is the feed is white and doesn't state a gauge. I don't think it's any thicker tho. Pretty sure it's 24 as well. With the newer machine the status says 100 but I can bridge the connection and get 368.8. However, running a speedtest comes up to about 80. I'm going to chalk that up to peak usage time for the isp not being around 100. The laptop I can't get to bridge and it says 100. It says I need 2 connections that aren't being shared. I was trying to set up a remote desktop a while back and turned every sharing thing on I could find. I turn off connection sharing and not sharing any folders with my network and it still won't bridge. The only thing I havent done is take the feed cable and plug it directly into the two newer machines. It's just not long enough to do that and I can't find an extention. I can plug one of the new ones into the old one and see if it keeps the rating. I'll do that and update this post.

 

[dverdier]

For some reason the old machine has a gig speed connection regardless of the cable. I would totally expect this to be the other way around. In fact my newer machine has a faster connection via wifi. Thats where the extra 286 is coming from via the bridged connection. Ethernet at 100.

 

[bill001g]

When the status say 100mbps you either have a bad port or you have a bad cable. Bad cables work on some machines but not others, some machined tolerate a cable out of spec better.

No way you can fix a bad port, this is all a hardware function. Unless maybe you hard coded 100mbps in the settings other than that this is all done via hardware voltages etc it is not really something you can load software to fix.

 

[dverdier]

When the status say 100mbps you either have a bad port or you have a bad cable. Bad cables work on some machines but not others, some machined tolerate a cable out of spec better.

No way you can fix a bad port, this is all a hardware function. Unless maybe you hard coded 100mbps in the settings other than that this is all done via hardware voltages etc it is not really something you can load software to fix.

Well that sux to hear

 

[bill001g]

You just have to find the bad cable. It is extremely rare for it to be a port.

 

[dverdier]

You just have to find the bad cable. It is extremely rare for it to be a port.

So you still think it's the cable. Outside of buying a long one, and I don't know if they sell them in any sort of length, I haven't looked either, I don't know what else to do. I pulled them right from a box of new cable and followed one of the industry standard terminations. I copied the same way as the one that works well. I've been told from guys in the field that it doesn't matter. so long as they're the same on each end, but some are twisted more than others so I chose to look one up and use it instead of haphazardly choosing an order. Again, they're brand new out of the box. I don't know what else to try. Unless somehow installing a driver changed my bandwdith, I haven't changed anything software wise intentionally that would limit me.

 

[bill001g]

It is likely one of the wires internal to one of the ends is only making partial contact. You should be able to tell which cable you need to check by look at the lights or in one of the status screens.

Unfortunately you are just going to have guess which end. When it works at 100mbps and you are using standard colors it is usually the blue or the brown pair. Look very carefully with a magnifier if you can and see if the wire appear to go all the way to the end of the jack. It is common to get a poor connection if the wires are not fully inserted.

For long cables that are mostly permanatent it is easier to use keystone jacks and then use short commerical cables from the jack to the machine. keystones you can do one wire at time rather than trying to get all 8 perfectly aligned. You can also pull them out and repunch them. They now make toolless keystones so you do not even need a punchdown tool.

You can double check the settings and make sure it is set to auto but the only real option when a port is bad is to buy a USB or pcie device to replace it.

 

[dverdier]

Sorry for leaving this open ended. I just had a death in the family. I highly doubt any of the ports are bad. The tool I used is one of those compression tools for 45 and 11s. I'll find a magnifying glass and check them out. Which settings are you referring to exactly and where would they be located? I didn't know you could restrict your bandwidth or set it to auto. I just thought it was whatever it was.

 

[letmepicyou]

Sorry for leaving this open ended. I just had a death in the family. I highly doubt any of the ports are bad. The tool I used is one of those compression tools for 45 and 11s. I'll find a magnifying glass and check them out. Which settings are you referring to exactly and where would they be located? I didn't know you could restrict your bandwidth or set it to auto. I just thought it was whatever it was.

You'll want to go into device manager, expand your network adapter, right click your adapter and hit properties.
In the display adapter properties you'll see a list on the left and the drop down for the selected item on the right.
Go into there and check all your settings. You can set the speed of your network card in windows in there, be it 10/100/1000, or if you be really modern you might see a 2.5 g in there. There's quite a list of settings (like Green Power, ect) to check, and there are plenty of websites that you can reference (via a quick google search) that will tell you what each setting does and what changes are safe to make.
The worst thing you can do is mess up a setting you shouldn't, in which case you just right click the device in device manager, click uninstall, then reboot and allow the machine to re-recognize it.