ASUS X670E-E GAMING - Intel I225-V ethernet port goes in down randomly

Communities OpenPleb: Hardware Fails
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Hi, I bought this component not even 3 months ago… this is my tale. The motherboard loses connection (while connected via ethernet cable) completely randomly. Once it has happened when the system had just started for example, most times after some hours that it doesn’t work. I have seen it more often happening when the system was either in idle or when it was under extreme load, but never when it’s under normal load. When the ethernet cable disconnects if you look at the status of the ethernet adapter you can see it’s in DOWN and forcing it back UP won’t make any difference, it will remain DOWN. The only way to temporary fix this problem is by fully rebooting the machine. This error is well documented by many other users like in here:

Reddit /r/buildapc/comments/xypn1m/network_card_intel_ethernet_controller_i225v_igc

and here:

Gist GitHub /LilDojd/2f030ecc5c5b6f8c3285725adfb8c456.

It’s a problem that not only affects my motherboard but also a wide variety of motherboards all made by ASUS with this same type of issue. I have actually contacted ASUS to resolve the problem, but I was replied to that they support exclusively Windows as a platform to take issues from. Which on top of being straight up illegal as a behavior in Europe (where I am) is also quite the douchy thing to say. Some users in the thread I linked before straight up contacted INTEL too, but apparently they won’t fix the issue either because the error is present only on the boards assembled by ASUS. So now neither ASUS, nor INTEL want to fix this motherboard and I am left with the mitigation suggested into the thread.

Namely:
Adding the kernel parameters: “pcie_port_pm=off pcie_aspm.policy=performance”

With these mitigation the system behaves normaly, at least for what I could observe in the short time I had it.

Currently running Fedora 38, with BIOS version 1416 (the latest one), an AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900X3D and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming OC 24GB GDDR6.

The error is present only on Linux, at least according to the ASUS support team. As such anyone with my hardware is cut out from having a natively working ethernet.

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Welcome to the forums, I wish I had an answer for you on this one, I have the same mobo with the 7950x CPU and the RX 6900XT GPU.

But I run Windows 11 Pro and I’ve not seen this happen.

However my older AM4 mobo with a Realtek NIC would randomly drop/disconnect under the same Windows 11 OS so it maybe hit or miss as to what OS and/or chipset is being used.

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Yeah, I suspected the system would have well behaved under Windows, I did talk to the ASUS support for a good chunk of the last month and they openly told me that it works there and they are not interested in even opening a ticket for just Linux alone. It truly sucks the fact that they won’t even bother to be sure that their devices have core functionalities working.

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So, not sure if you can test/try this out, but do you have or can purchase a PCIe network card based on a different Intel Chipset or a Realtek chipset and see what happens ?

I would make sure to disable the onboard NIC in the BIOS and then test to see if the same thing occurs.

Also, have you checked to see if maybe there are some other linux driver packages to test with ?

5

I unfortunately can’t buy an extra network card at the moment, would your test be equally valid if I were to use one of those small Ethernet to USB dongles?

And no, I am not aware of any other drivers I could use, I started working immediately after I bought the device so I wanted to maintain a stable system (as I need my computer for my job). In about two weeks I should be able to install Arch if needed, with that I feel more comfortable swapping drivers or kernel modules. Do you happen to know anything that could work with Fedora anyway?

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Yeah, that should work if you wanna try out a USB 2 ETH adapter as well, basically you want to see if the same thing occurs with a different chipset.

But review the Linux distro you are using to confirm proper driver support.

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Will definitely give it a try as soon as I have a day for me off work, will let you know! Thanks