Multi-GB LAN on ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE Motherboard?

Hardware Hub Motherboards
1

I am trying to upgrade the 1 GBe LAN on an ASUS Pro WS X57-ACE running Windows 10. It should be easy, right?

I have tried the Plugable 2.5 GBe USB dongle in every USB port and a TrendNet TEG-25GECTX in PCIex16 slot 2 (my GPU covers the PCIe x1 slot). The Plugable gives 1.25 Gb/sec on iperf3, the TrendNet shows an erratic 900ish Mb/sec, which is worse than the 945 Mb/sec on the built-in Intel NIC and 920 Mb/sec on the built-in Realtek NIC.

My Mac Mini on the same network gives 2.3 Gb/sec using the Plugable dongle. I am running out of ideas.

Any success stories out there? I’d love to hear what hardware will work, anything up to 10 GB.

For reference the system has Ryzen 9 3950x, 3080 Ti, one M.2 drive and one U.2 drive.

2

Does it have to be a dongle via USB?

Tested the very same motherboard with an Intel X550 (2 x 10 GbE) and XL710 (2 x 40 GbE) NIC, works fine. That TrendNet TEG-25GECTX with Realtek chipset is giving me a bad feeling…

If your hardware configuration description is complete then you got the third PCIe x16 (from chipset, x8) still free. This motherboard is the only X570 model out there that has an electrical x8 slot from the X570 chipset, so you can use up to an PCIe Gen3 x8 NIC without noticeable performance loss since the chipset is connected to the CPU with PCIe Gen4 x4.

1 Like
3

@aBav.Normie-Pleb Thanks for the fast reply! No it doesn’t need to be a USB dongle. I was just testing that as a lowest-effort scheme.

I think I will take your advice and just go with an X550 PCIe NIC hooked up to the bottom PCIe slot. X550 seems to be a well-respected NIC.

1 Like
4

Should work great!

Please note that the X550 gets firmware bug fixes by Intel quite regularly, even if you don’t purchase an Intel-branded NIC with that chipset you can use Intel’s “Ethernet Adapter Complete Driver Pack” (see Intel® Ethernet Adapter Complete Driver Pack ) to update the NIC’s firmware, decompress the package’s ZIP file and go to \NVMUpdatePackage\X550. Even the XL710 (from 2014) still gets multiple firmware fixes per year.

I’m currently experimenting with a Pro WS X570-ACE/5900X build where the two CPU PCIe slots house an HBA for external SAS Expanders and a PCIe switch card for two Icy Dock 4 x U.2 backplanes and I also have to use the chipset x8 slot for the NIC (the mentioned XL710). A 2D ASpeed GPU is in the x1 slot since the system is storage-only.

Funnily enough Ryzen 5000 gave a noticeable performance boost for the old-ass XL710 since Single-Thread performance helps out here quite a bit.

1 Like
5

I installed an Intel X550-T2 in the bottom slot and now things work as they should. i.e. the other bottlenecks in the system rear their head. It’s always something. But at least it’s not the ethernet link any more. Thanks for the tips, @aBav.Normie-Pleb!

1 Like
6

This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.