GA-X58A-UD3R rev2.0 onboard LAN not working as Gigabit

[orfeas]

Hello all,

First timer here. I have put together my first system using the X58A-UD3R rev2 mobo and must say that most everything is working nicely thanks to a lot of your hard work. The only issue I am having is with my onboard NIC which only seems to link at 100baseT instead of Gigabit. Upon initial install, it was establishing a Gigabit link. For some bizarre reason it would take a while to start up, but at least it worked after that. What I mean is that I would log in, then have to wait 10 or so seconds before the LED would light up on my network switch, which I thought was unusual. I reran Multibeast to try the other network driver but then went back to the Lnx2Mac driver. I must have somehow screwed this up, because now I can only connect at the 100 speed. According to my Profiler, I am using v0.0.67 of the RealtekRTL81xx.kext in /System/Library/Extensions.. (image attached)

Are there other network driver files installed somewhere that are now interfering with this? Or is it a problem with my mobo? I found a recommendation elsewhere on this forum about disconnecting the ethernet cable and reconnecting, but that didn't seem to do anything. I also ran the BIOS LAN test (exact results escape me at the moment but I can post if it will help).

Any thoughts?

Your help is much appreciated.

 

[BartMan01]

Boot to BIOS and run the 'smart lan' utility/process until it identifies the connection as 1GB. Then reboot. Every once in a while my onboard lan drops back to 100MB speed (regardless of OS running) and running smart lan fixes it.

 

[orfeas]

Thanks BartMan01,

That did the trick. I hope I don't have to do this often. I'll be transferring large media files back and forth to this machine (25 GB per recording session typically). How often is "once in a while"? Sounds like a hardware/firmware type problem, so maybe I just need to get a separate NIC.

Thanks for your help!

 

[Lnx2Mac]

Thanks BartMan01,

That did the trick. I hope I don't have to do this often. I'll be transferring large media files back and forth to this machine (25 GB per recording session typically). How often is "once in a while"? Sounds like a hardware/firmware type problem, so maybe I just need to get a separate NIC.

Thanks for your help!

Orfeas,
I've seen this happening only on reboot... And it's really not that frequent (I'd say much less than once a month).
As its been seen by many on Windows, Linux, and OSX, it's unlikely a driver issue.

However the fix is really simple.
I documented a full procedure for this here: http://bit.ly/DeadNIC

 

[orfeas]

This is too unreliable for me. It seemed to work one day, then the next it went back to 100T. I even disabled my onboard NIC and used a Netgear GA311 card, and oddly enough it was behaving the same way (100baseT connection only). I did a little research and found out that the cabling makes a difference. I am embarrassed to admit this, but I didn't know there was a difference in ethernet cables in terms of max speed. I looked at all of mine and they are all Cat-5 cables. I had a single Cat-5e cable which apparently can handle gigabit speeds (as opposed to Cat-5 which technically doesn't) and sure enough the link on my Netgear switch lit up as gigabit. This is with the GA311 card. Tomorrow I am going to buy a Cat-6 cable to test this with my onboard NIC and see what happens. I'll post my findings if anyone is interested.

The odd thing is that both my Macbook Pro and my work laptop (HP), both use Cat-5 cables and they are somehow connecting as 1000T. I wonder if there are a lot of retransmissions on those cables and if I would benefit from replacing them with Cat-6? Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks