I am upgrading to a 3900x but still haven’t decided on motherboard. So far I have narrowed it down to two motherboards the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite or the Asus TUF GamingX570-Plus.
While I like the I/O on the Asus board better it has Realtek LAN instead of Intel, and I have heard bad things about Realtek LAN. My question is if Realtek LAN is any worse than Intel and if Realtek LAN has good Linux support?
If Realtek LAN is fine on Linux then I will definitely go with the Asus board unless anyone has a better suggestion for a board in that price range. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
It’s fine on Linux, there’s really only a small performance difference between the two and the realtek drivers might be broke for some specific use cases but in general you’ll be fine
The main reason some prefer Intel over RealTek is the polished drivers and better NIC teaming support/performance but neither board has dual-NICs. RealTek has supported NIC teaming for awhile but overall speeds are a bit slower than Intel & Qualcomm’s Killer chipset in certain usage conditions–again Killer has awful bugs in their software and some would prefer RealTek. Quite possible ASUS is using the newer RealTek chipset which improves the sustained speeds & their own optional QoS software–the gap between RealTek & Intel has continued to shrink which is good for competition.
From experience of various versions of RealTek NICs some chipsets models have their own weird Linux or Windows specific issues but I would have to note they have been more active in driver updates. Realtek L8200A is fairly recent and also they’ve been working on higher-end NIC chipsets(5G & 10G) which I also recall ASUS had been offering since the Skylake/Kaby era.
I simply refuse to use anything but Intel NICs. I had some problems with Realtek in the past (like 10+ years ago or so). Never had any problem with Intel networking. Only exception I made recently are the aquantia 10Gbit NICs on both my X470 Taichi Ultimate boards. Those are fine.
I think I will end up going with the Aorus Elite which I initially didn’t realize had BIOS flashback and I will probably get more use out of the Intel LAN over the better USB I/O the TUF Gaming provides.
Hi CaptClock;
I have the same question as you posted in this thread. I am also an Ubuntu user and am considering the same two x570 boards.
I would appreciate your input, which board did you purchase, what was your outcome?