1Gbs Network Card Only Pulls 300Mbs out of 400Mbs

[MikeEwins]

I seem to have good luck here finding good network support on this forum so I am hoping to keep that going.

We recently upgraded our ISP plan to 500Mbs download. The modem only supports 400Mbs and this is good enough for now.

The issue that we're running into is that our media server only seems to be pulling 200-300Mbs when we test it from fast.com. Note that I was getting 200Mbs on 8 concurrent connections with fast.com. If I increase it to 16, this goes to 300Mbs, but no further settings seems to improve this. If I take the cable out of the server and plug it into a Surface Pro and test it via USB Network adapter, I get the full expected 400Mbs on fast.com -- on only 8 concurrent connections, go figure.

Note that the 200-300Mbs limit occurs on the network adapter built into the board on the media server and with a network card on one of its expansion slots.

The ports are reporting 1.0Gbps:



Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Gabriel Pike]

So, one thing to check is the CPU usage. I have had older systems be limited on their network interface because the CPU is the bottleneck. It could also be an oudated network driver. In some rare occasions it may even be the PCs overall health. eg. runing apps, malware, hardware issue

 

[MikeEwins]

Thank you @Gabriel Pike for your suggestions. The CPU is pretty free and is a Ryzen 7 2700.

I was more concerned about this when I was only getting 200, but 300 now is better and this is what speedtest.net reflects as well. Still it would be nice to get to that 400. I suppose drivers are next up to explore.

 

[MikeEwins]

Turns out I did have an older version of the network driver for this motherboard installed. I upgraded to the latest, but no dice.

 

[MikeEwins]

After a much-resisted clean reinstall of Windows 10, I am now getting 570Mbs out of a 500Mb/s plan So, seems my Windows install was severely corrupted.