[SOLVED] Will 2GB internet get full speed on 10M/100M/1G/2.5Gbps network card?

Ehreekuh

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Aug 5, 2016
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Hi there! So I have 2GB fiber internet and just installed the Rosewill RC-20001 2.5Gbps PCI-Express x1 2.5GBASE-T PCIe Network Adapter, a Cat6 cable, played with the Advanced Properties (changed my EEE Max Support Speed and Speed & Duplex to 2.5 Gbps Full Duplex), installed all drivers, my Device Manager is showing the Network adapter as Realtek PCIe 2.5GbE Family Controller but the light on the card is only showing the 1G/10/10/ACT LED lit (the 2.5G/ACT is not lit) and my Ethernet Status is still showing "Speed: 1.0 Gbps". Any ideas?
 
It is highly likely the ISP is playing games when they say a connection is 2gbit. They maybe adding the upload and download speeds like wifi does or something.

Unless the router itself has faster than 1gbit ports it is all marketing hype. They can pretend it is faster on the fiber going into the router because you have no way to test it. This could also be the total network speed you and all your neighbors share.

Still this is mostly a bragging rights number. It is almost impossible to even use 1gbit ports inside your house without special design. It isn't the network that is the limitation it is how the file system and disk systems are working that is more of the cap. The very obvious one people see is the difference in time to say copy 10,000 small files compared to coping 1 large file between SSD in the same machine. The overhead in the first case is massive.

This is one of those things I have been thinking about. The ISP did their normal yearly raise the price things here recently. Since I only use really the very high speed ability when I download something like a large game I have begun to think if it really is worth the extra money or I should drop to a slower plan. Does it really matter if it takes 5 minutes rather than 8 minutes to download some huge things once or twice a month at most. If it is a steam game it takes more time doing its verifying and installing that it does actually downloading.

The 2.5g stuff is very unstable lately with a couple vendors having small hardware issue that can not really be fixed via firmware. I am not sure why they are doing this. The 10g technology is actually much more mature and there is very little price difference. The 2.5g stuff is only really being sold into the consumer market actual servers used by large companies have always used 10g ports when they needed more than 1g.

In any case it only matters if the complete path between you and the server is 2 gbit. Any port that is only 1gbit will limit. And this ignores articial limits placed by the server. It does not want a small number of users with very fast connections to use all the bandwidth so they limit the amount you can download.

Key here speed really only matters for large download...and bragging. Things like netflix use only a fixed amount of bandwidth no matter what since it is streamed and not downloaded. Web pages are many hundreds of tiny files transfers and the overhead will limit things well before the bandwidth would.
 
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Ehreekuh

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Aug 5, 2016
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Thank you everyone! I was trying to explain to my husband that because the network card is only capable of either 10M or 100M or 1G or 2.5G that our 2G internet is kind of a "hoax" and because we are literally between 1G and 2.5G the cap will only be the max that it can in one of those speeds. In this case, the 1G since it cannot achieve the 2.5G, but if we had 10G then it would cap at 2.5G on this network card. He didn't believe me, so I took to y'all. :D
 

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