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I bought and assembled a new PC. It runs on Gigabyte H110 based MOBO, i3 6100 Skylake CPU, no dedicated GPU card, 8GB DDR3 memory, SSD disk. Ever since I installed an OS on it (Windows 10 N first and soon after that Solus OS 1.2 in dual-boot) I am having problems with networking.

My network looks like this:

PC (Ethernet Realtek) -> Cat5e STP (SF/UTP shielding) 10m cable -> LAN port in my ISP provided ZTE router -> ISPs network.

OK. Now the problem. I pay for 70Mbps download speed with WiFi my other devices are able to pull 40-45Mbps due to high interference. OK. Via that Ethernet cable I get anywhere between 1-4Mbps, mind you - not MBps it's literally Mbps. I installed Realtek network drivers and one time I managed to get like 71Mbps out of it. Later it just went back to 1-4Mbps, sometimes as high as 10Mbps. On Linux after some initial problems with kernel modules not having the proper driver (thus not connecting at all) I managed to get the same results as on Windows.

If I connect my phone to WiFi and to that PC via USB to tether connection via USB I get 40Mbps on that desktop PC as well.

Any ideas? Where would you look for errors/misconfiguration?

edit 1: I tested the same cable/router port on my ASUS laptop. I got 68-71Mbps. Then I tried tethering WiFi via USB from my smartphone and it got to 50Mbps. The low speed issue is happening on both Windows and Linux. When I use USB to receive connection - does it use the onboard network card?

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2 Answers 2

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It sounds to me like the cable/router port might be suspect. The current drivers were able to hit 71MBps once, and while connected to your phone it was running 40MBps... so it seems to me that the drivers have the capability of hitting the speeds that meet your needs.

Grab a laptop, connect the Ethernet cable to the port and see how the speeds go using speedtest.net. If it's still slow, then its either the cable or the port on the router, try changing ports and run it again. If its still slow, swap out the cable and give it another go.

If the speed on the laptop is fine, I would check your network adapter drivers again. Once you download up to date drivers, compatible with windows 10. I would then completely uninstall your current network drivers before installing the new one. If your currently running the recommended network adapter drivers, consider rolling back to a previous version to see if that offers better performance. But before rolling anything back, make sure you have a back up of your current drivers...

Also, my MSI motherboard came with a piece of software that would tell me what drivers I needed to be running, does gigabit come with anything similar? If so, install it and see what it says.

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  • I tested the connection (same cable, same router port) on my ASUS laptop and I got 68-71Mbps speed on speedof.me the same site I used to test the desktop. The slow speed is experienced on both Linux and Windows so I guess that's not the drivers' issue. Faulty motherboard?
    – user134865
    Jul 1, 2016 at 16:31
  • Could be, but I'm hesitant to make that leap just yet. Is there a way to turn off linux and only load windows in safe mode? I'm wondering if there is a conflict going on between the two machines. Jul 1, 2016 at 16:51
  • I know when I used to run a few VM machines that windows would show a list of all the different network adapters for each machine, do you see anything like that? Jul 1, 2016 at 17:12
  • I don't get it. I started PC right now, went to speedof.me. And got the proper speed. Without changing anything.
    – user134865
    Jul 2, 2016 at 16:30
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I found the culprit.

So what was happening is that Windows 10 would get up to 70Mbps without any problem... until I booted Linux. It seems like Windows didn't like the way Linux was leaving hardware state. That's why sometimes (after cold reboots) it worked properly. It seems like it's a known (although rather rare) issue with Realtek drivers.

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