Intel i-225-v NIC

So not sure if this was just a hiccup and if this is not the NIC itself.

When it RAINS it POURS, having to replace my router and now this happens on my gaming rig.

I have an ASUS motherboard with the above 2.5gb NIC.

Today the connection dropped and checking the cabling and disconnecting and connecting again didn’t resolve the issue.

The driver stack was damaged somehow, removed from Device Manager and reinstalled and then updated the driver package resolved the matter.

Anybody seen this happen ?

The adapter is connected to my network switch and not the router directly.

My two other local computers were still working fine, no issues.

Any ideas/tips on what to look for ?

Running on Windows 11 Pro, latest build and drivers installed.

Did you get the latest driver direct from Intel or from the ASUS support page?

it would have been the base driver from ASUS and then I use the Driver Booster Pro app from IO Bit to detect any updates and it grabs the latest package from there, not sure if they keep their own repo or not.

It scanned and showed the initial driver as damaged which was a new one on me.

Maybe it was bjorked and I needed to remove it anyways ?

ASUS is probably hosting an ancient version of the driver. Install the latest version direct from Intel:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/15084/intel-ethernet-adapter-complete-driver-pack.html

Thanks…

IIRC, i225 was fraught with issues when it came out which have gradually been fixed in firmware/driver updates (not familiar with Windows specifically, but in Linux/BSD world, that was the case), so hopefully @GTwannabe is right and the newer firmware fixes it. Unfortunate because a lot of people trust Intel NICs by default.

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I was wondering if this was the case with this particular NIC.

I will check out the intel link to confirm things.

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I’ve seen it come up around the last couple generations of SFF hardware people use for pfsense or diy routers. In those cases, the shortcomings were eventually worked-around in the OS but the gist was that i225 itself wasn’t designed or implemented properly.

Ok then, so this is why so many peeps rather have the i226 version as the hardware changes included fixes and what not.

But then again were there some issues with some of the distros not properly supporting the 226 NIC when it was released ?

TLDR: I225/I226 specific hardware bug, ongoing issue that hasn’t been fixed for 4 years. Avoid if possible

No, intel has failed to fix it yet, even with last hardware revision getting new version number Yes it still fundamentally i-225.

I-225 went through 4 hardware revisions and countless driver updates I think, and none fixed the issue reliably.

If you are having random disconnection on 2,5 GBE link, it almost certainly caused by intel nic. With i-225 models, workaround was using 1 GBE mode since it was supposed to be stable. Go to you nic setting and force negotaion to 1GB link.

With i-226 disable Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) per intel reccomendation.

Also make sure your nic drivers are up to date. Go through event viewer to get an ideadwhat you driver has been reporting when encoutering issues.

Ref2: https://community.intel.com/t5/Ethernet-Products/Intel-Communication-Intel-Ethernet-Controller-I226-Series-Random/td-p/1453177
Ref3: Intel is experiencing network issues: The I226-V controller is prone to connection loss

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@greatnull do you know of a 2.5gb chipset that isn’t a garbage fire? i225/6 are really the only ones on my radar (obviously others exist, but I haven’t seen them in the wild).

The Aquantia (Marvel) work well

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This is 90 bucks, and supports 10/5/2.5/1GbE.

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Sorry, I am still on GBE network, so no practical experience wit 2,5 gbe networking.

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Only in linux as far as I know., windows drivers support maybe. definitely no nbase support in vmware

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As far as I’ve seen, the RTL8125B seems to be fine for 2.5G that “just works”, although I have limited experience with it (so far, so good), and I haven’t combed the internet in search of problems. Probably nothing fancy, like its ubiquitous 1G brethren, but it doesn’t seem to share the bugs of the i225.

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Aquantia goes under the radar often but is usually good and cheap.

OpenBSD has a driver too.

https://man.openbsd.org/aq.4

I’m using an X550-AT2 based NIC on windows and have tested NBASE-T. I haven’t tried it in my ESXi box though so can’t say anything about vmware.

An NVRAM update is required for NBASE-T support if the card is old enough that it still has the earlier NVRAM.

RLT8125 series is even more problematic than i225 series. I had one and it didn’t function well even at gigabit speeds, much less 2.5g speeds. Googling it I found many long threads of unending problems with driver updates up the wazoo and no better function. Some people suggested limiting the nic to 100Mb/s speeds, disabling UDP entirely, and various other huge kneecappings to try and fnagle it into just not killing downloads or locking up under torrents.
Most of these problems seem to occur on specific motherboard chipsets, though. I believe X570 was particularly prone to 2.5G nic incompatibility, which is tragic since so many high-end boards shipped with RLT8125B.

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