Do I need to install a special program called Intel X540-T1 for my computer running Windows 10 Pro version 22H2?
Do I need to install a special program called Intel X540-T1 for my computer running Windows 10 Pro version 22H2?
I use a SuperMicro X10SRL-F motherboard with the latest BIOS and drivers for my Intel card. I have Windows 10 Pro 22H2 installed on it. The card is plugged into a PCI slot that connects to a Netgear switch, even though I tried setting the slot speed to Gen3 in the BIOS but no difference happened.
The driver version from February 2022 works fine for internet browsing and testing with iPerf3 against another machine running CentOS 7. However, my internet connection only gets me about 1Gbps on Windows, not more than that. I tested different cables and the problem stays the same. When I test it at 5201 Mbps (which is the ID of the port), both machines can get full speed:
- The other machine downloads at 2337 Mbps and uploads at 2546 Mbps with very low delay.
- My machine gets only about 984 Mbps download but drops to around 561 Mbps when I wait a bit longer, and then goes down to 0 Mbps completely for a long stretch before coming back up slowly.
My internet connection is actually just 2Gbps (using both upload and download lines). The other machine has no problems at all with the same connection settings. Even a speedtest from my own computer shows that I am limited by the network card, not the cable or the router, because my test gets me stuck around 1.57 Gbps instead of my full speed.
Intel says in their driver file that they only tested this driver on Windows 10 Pro systems, so they probably don't support my setup well enough to get maximum speed out of it.
Windows 10 wasn't meant for fast gigabit connections like 10GE. Have you tried a TCP Optimizer tool at speedguide.net? It changes network settings to help with high speed. You also need to make sure Jumbo Frames are turned on in your router or switch. For 10GE, you should set the MTU to 9000 bytes and check if your hardware can handle it. Also remember that some slots have physical connectors but only four electrical connections based on those pages from the manual at supermicro.com
It looks like you've already used iperf, which means you're pretty skilled compared to most people who just post here. If it's a hardware problem or bad drivers on your Windows system, I'd try putting a Linux image from a USB stick into the computer. These images usually work with standard 10gbit network cards. That won't tell you everything though. Even if that doesn't fix it, you should think about limiting what you can do because of hardware limits. If it works in this way, then the real trouble is probably hiding deep inside Windows settings or drivers, not your machine. One more thing: have you tried swapping the server and client so data goes the other way? It shouldn't make any difference.
I tried Slot 7 Gen3 X8 and nothing changed. Even on that card, the fastest I managed was 5Gb/s. Sometimes, while testing with iPerf on Slot 3 (the main slot), I hit speeds over a gigabyte per second. But whenever I use Ookla or Google speed tests, they stay way below one gig.
I tried some old driver versions before. Nothing changed from the very first one up until version 28 right now. Since then, I ran iPerf and got around 5Gigabit per second for two tests. But once I switched back to normal things, it went down under 1Gigabit per second.
I'm running a local iperf server on my computer at C:\Users\esilva\bin. When I started the program, it connected to localhost and tried to talk to another host at port 5201. The connection seemed fine when both sides were ready. While testing, I noticed that sometimes I got around 10 Gbits per second for a few seconds. Other times, my transfer speed dropped down to about 10 Gbits/sec or even less. After checking the logs, I saw that some runs went up to 12.4 GBytes in total while others stayed at roughly 12 GBytes. My computer was sending data fast sometimes but slowed down a lot other times too. This is normal when you run big tests like this on your own machine.