Greetings,
A recently acquired motherboard has an on-board Intel i219-V NIC. Within a fresh Win7 Pro SP1 x64 install with latest Intel drivers (driver v12.15.23.1, PROSet v21.0.504.0), I am experiencing stability issues with this NIC when a specific combination of factors are met:
1. NIC is set to any Link Speed above 10Mbps Full Duplex (100M-Full, 1G-Full, & Auto Negotiate)
2. Steam (the application from Valve) is downloading application and/or game updates
Basically once Steam starts its updates and reaches about 1MB/s transfer rate, the link drops and the whole computer loses its network connection (LAN and WAN) - all LAN ARP entries are flushed, cannot ping local gateway router, Windows shows the little yellow triangle over the network icon (link but no L2/L3, self-assigned 169 address)
Once this issue occurs, it is resolvable in only two ways:
- Reboot the computer
- Change the Link Speed settings under the NIC's Device Properties page in Device Manager. It doesn't matter what I set it to, just the action of re-setting this parameter is enough to re-negotiate the link again, it seems.
The only workaround that I've found so far is to manually set the NIC Link speed to 10Mbps Full - the NIC is stable (albeit much slower) in this configuration.
Other Troubleshooting & Notes:
- No other application or traffic type seems to result in this behavior. For example, speed tests, iperf tests, torrent, etc all max out my WAN (not LAN) with ease, without the NIC dropping the link
- Replaced relevant CAT6 patch cables (all test good as well)
- Tested different port on LAN switch (NIC is connected directly to an enterprise HP ProCurve switch)
- Tested with switchport speed/duplex settings always matching NIC Link Speed settings (100M-Full, 10M-Full, etc)
Edit: I tested with a USB3.0 Ethernet adapter, and Steam has no issues maxing out the ISP without the link dropping. All other equipment is the same and configured the same.