Is my ITX PC too slow for gigabit?

I

ispeck

n00b
Joined
Aug 20, 2014
Messages
2
Specs:
CPU: AMD Sempron 2650
Mobo: Asus Mini ITX Am1I-A
8 gb DDR3


So I've got a gigabit network with an HTPC in my main room and a few other PC's around the house.

Every device on the network gets blazing fast speeds doing an OOKLA sppedtest (anywhere from 70-100Mb/s down and 6-8Mb/s Upload

Every device EXCEPT the Sempron-Mini-ITX box I built for my back room. It only gets max 3Mb/s 99% of the time.

It has a gigabit port, I have tried cat5e and cat6 cable including physically moving the box to the same room and using the same cable and port that my desktop PC gets around 85Mb/s on....no luck. I've given it a direct line to the router and no luck either.
I have uninstalled and re-installed various drivers from the Asus mobo site and from Realtek's site directly and played around with every network setting I can think of.
Here's the weird thing: SOMETIMES I will see the speed test complete at 20Mb/s down but most of the time it won't go over 3Mb/s. The UPLOAD, however will often be faster than the download at 6-7Mb/s.

Windows reports the connection as 1.0 gigabit, I've set Speed and Duplex to force 1 gigabit full duplex. The only thing I can think of is either the NIC is bad or the CPU is just too slow to handle a faster connection.
 
Doesn't it install some sort of iControl network bandwidth prioritization software? Try disabling it or uninstalling it.

Also, how's the throughput if you directly connect another PC using a cross-over cable and doing a file copy?
 
I read somewhere that with the AMD E-350's .. or at least whatever brand this guy/gal had .. using the PCI-e slot (I think he had a video card in it) slowed his network speeds down .. dono if that is the problem you are having though but thought I'd throw it out there...
 
thanks for the replies

No I don't have any other cards plugged in to the slots and there is no iControl software installed

I also added a USB 3.0 gigabit adapter today to see if it got any better speed and it's the same
I see CPU usage stay around 100% when doing a speed test so I'm thinking the cheapo Sempron is the bottleneck
 
Hard to imagine it being that slow when a single core Duron 1.6GHz running Windows XP attains ~10MByte/s with 100Mbit PCI NIC or ~15MByte/s with 1Gbit PCI NIC.

Maybe Athlon 5350 ($57 at Microcenter) would've been a better choice since it's the same TDP but up to 3X faster. You can also try booting Ubuntu Live 14.04.1 USB key to rule out Windows being the bottleneck.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_athlon_sempron&num=1
 
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How much bandwidth are you paying for from your ISP?

The Ookla Speedtest flash app is a pretty lousy and poorly optimized bandwidth test with a heck of a lot of overhead.

I have an E-350 box that has no problem saturating 95% of a gigabit link using non Speedtest methods.

If flash GPU hardware acceleration isn't working that would hurt performance, I would make sure that it's enabled.

I would try a real speedtest like iperf between various systems on your LAN to eliminate the unknown variables of flash.

Also try downloading something large via HTTP or FTP during off-peak hours from someone with a lot of bandwidth (like a Windows service pack: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24). The speed reported by your browser will be MB/s not Mb/s, so multiply by 8 to get your "speed test" equivalent number. If you also get more then the 3 or sometimes 20 with ookla - its an issue with speedtest.net.
 
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