As I have the Gigabyte H170-Gaming 3 motherboard for
my recent Hackintosh, which is also equipped with this Killer E2200, I made a search in the forum for 'Killer' in order to check whether other members here encountered with a common problem with this chip and got to this thread. It's great to hear that members have managed to actually use that chip in their Hackintosh build. I just want to note something about this chip, as some of you might encounter this common problem further on:
I'm myself a PC technician and usually don't need much assistance. But when I picked the H170-Gaming 3, a guy from the lab of that store has told me that this motherboard is great, though it has a little flaw with the built-in Ethernet Killer chip. He told me that they found that as this motherboard was meant for gamers, Gigabyte decided to equip it with the Killer chip because this particular chip was designed to utilize the maximum bandwidth of your network for better gaming experience. Think of it as a quality-of-service feature so the gamer will always have the highest bandwidth for his computer. But the only problem is when you have other computers in your house that are dependent on your router or switch, as once the Killer chip is connect to the network, they will suffer from BAD bandwidth experience. And I'm talking about 10kbps even if they're all connected to your 1 Gigabit (1000Mbps) switch.
In my house I have my main computer (the recent Hackintosh I just built which is running both Windows and MacOS),
my mini-Hackintosh next to it, another computer as a backup server in another room, another computer in the living room, and yet another computer in yet another room (I know, too many computers
). All these computer are connected via LAN cables to a 1 Gigabit switch, which is connected to my router that gives the internet connection for the entire house. The router/internet works in 100Mbps, but the switch gives the entire house a bandwidth of 1 Gigabit (again, 1000Mbps). Which is super for transferring files between computers.
The moment I hooked the H170-Gaming 3 motherboard to the switch and turned ON the computer, at the very post screens, the bandwidth of all the other computers dropped to about 10-12kbps! The guy from the lab has prepared me for that and said that it's not something in the operating system that might be fixed by a driver further on. It behaves like this as a feature that exists in this chip itself, even if you're in the BIOS! It's like "One chip to rule them all".
To see if it really happens where the computer is turned on, I turned it OFF and made a copy of some large files between my mini-Hackintosh and my backup server. The transfer rate was as it should normally be with a 1 Gigabit switch. And during the copy I turned ON my main computer. And guess what? The bandwidth dropped again to about 10-12kbps! In other tests when I began the copy
After my main computer was ON, the copy dialogue box hanged too long at the 'calculating' message before the actual copy even begun. At the moment there's no way of limiting that chip in the BIOS.
To workaround this I first disabled the on-board Killer chip in the BIOS, and picked a dedicated PCI-Express Ethernet adapter which is the
Intel® Gigabit CT Desktop Newegg | Amazon. First thing the problem was solved! But whats most - this adapter is even compatible with Hackintosh and works great right after installing the Intel kexts from MultiBeast!
So that's that. Most users probably won't notice this if they're running a single computer in their house. But should you have more computers like me and encounter this, check if one of your computers is equipped with the Killer chip. If so then there's your answer and solution altogether.
Hope someone will find this useful.