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 ?
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.
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.
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.
@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).
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.
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.