slow nic with asrock z270 mobo

Gabe3

2[H]4U
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May 23, 2006
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I just put a new system together with a asrock z270 motherboard. this nic seems to be capped at 9.7 Mbps. I should be downloading at 25. I plugged the ethernet cable into my laptop and its fine, so I know its not the cable/modem/router. I used the drivers win10 installed, I tried the drivers from the asrock site, and I let windows pick a newer driver as well from device manager. I also ran the intel driver update utility and installed a newer driver with that. still no change. I've looked at the performance tab of task manager and nothing is using the eithernet, receive sits at 0. then when I do a speed test or download from steam it only goes up to 9.7 Mbps. in steam I usually download at 3 MB/s and its only downloading at 1.2

the upload speed however is about what it should be. when windows boots, the ethernet takes forever to connect. steam opens and can't get a internet connection because the driver or whatever hasn't booted the nic up in time.
 
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Sounds like it is having trouble negotiating the speed properly. What brand nic is it? It could be a bad cable, the laptop nic might just be more tolerant to a bad cable.
 
Pop in an extra nic or use a USB nic and see if it is still jacked.

Make sure all the little pins in the onboard look ok and even and clean.

Buy MSI or ASUS next time :D
 
Pretty sure all their z270s have intel nics.

I'm going to point at your cables, router, any switches/bridges/whatevers and ISP before I even think about blaming an intel nic. I know you said you already did but seriously, verify all those first starting with cables, then verify again.

Also purge/uninstall any drivers as a botched install can mess thing up, stick to whatever win10 has for whql as even that should be able to saturate line speed without issue (>900Mb TCP).
 
What is the link speed? you said speed test shows 9.7mbps yet you can download from places at 1.2MBs, something is wrong there.

Have you tried transferring files from the laptop to the desktop over Ethernet? If so, what speeds did you hit?

What internet service do you have and speed plan?

What modem/router/switch?
 
What is the link speed? you said speed test shows 9.7mbps yet you can download from places at 1.2MBs, something is wrong there.

Have you tried transferring files from the laptop to the desktop over Ethernet? If so, what speeds did you hit?

What internet service do you have and speed plan?

What modem/router/switch?

turned out it was the cable. do cables go bad over time? its probably 10 years old. windows detects the cable and connects to the internet almost instantly now when booting up.

I got a new router/modem from att about a year ago and I've been putting two shirts over it because it dampens the high pitched noise it makes. I guess I have sensitive ears. I wonder if that extra heat made the cable go bad?
 

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Yes, cables can go bad over time. So it's always a good idea to try a different one when you run into a problem like this.
 
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