Hardware is stuck showing 100mbps
Hardware is stuck showing 100mbps
I had a weird problem recently. I bought a new 75-foot Cat6 ethernet line from Onn (even though they are not great, that is okay for now), and it says it can go up to one gigabit per second. My motherboard is an Asus Prime Z390-A. I installed the latest Intel Gigabit Ethernet drivers on my PC. The cable goes from my router upstairs all the way to a slot on my mobo (I did try plugging it directly into my modem, but that didn't work). I have gigabit fiber-optic internet service. My router can actually send out one gigabit via ethernet because when I log in to its screen, I see that my Genie 2 pulls in at the speed of one gigabit. Yes, I tried changing the cable to the Genie 2's slot on the router too. Even though I changed my adapter settings to force full duplex mode (which is fine since you should just use auto-negotiation), my PC thinks there is no ethernet cable plugged in at all. This has been a really frustrating situation. I hope it was my PC, because maybe I just ran this whole thing from upstairs for nothing.
No, I actually literally fixed this thing after about a week when I posted sorry. My fix: I got scared that I broke the cable while moving it, so I plugged my computer into WiFi and unplugged the ethernet from my PC instead of using the wire. Then I connected the ethernet to a Raspberry Pi 4 B that was sitting around, went into my router's web menu, and saw its port pulling gigabits. Phew! After that, I plugged the ethernet back in my PC. Finally, it's pulling at 1Gbps. No, the connectors weren't dirty (I unplugged the cable from my motherboard and cleaned the connector way more times than necessary), but something sure happened there. I guess it was magic. I swear, I'm cursed. BTW, I don't know why you said "real" cat5e because I mentioned before that my cables are cat6. Cat6 cables have more bandwidth. A cable isn't actually good or bad; it's just a cable. Unless you were talking about Onn being cheap 😂 Of course, if you meant the brand, I should have tried another one. I can't move my 35-pound PC around easily without its peripherals either, especially since it won't even boot past the BIOS screen right now. If I don't check this again with a hardware diagnostic tool, I might need to know if my computer is broken or not.
What he means, my a real cable is one that meets actual certified specs to be an ethernet cable. The words "CAT5e" and "CAT6" etc themselves mean nothing. The real certifications are things like EIA/TIA based things. The vast majority of what you find being sold on amazon and ebay are not actual ethernet cables. You find massive amounts of that flat or thin wire which has wire sizes too small and automatically disqualifies it from being a certified ethernet cable. These cables do "mostly" work but they have trouble on some machine and the fail much more commonly.
The cable didn't come from a website, but it felt kind of real too. It came from somewhere risky just like Amazon. It has RJ45 ends, 8 wires, good insulation, and a shield. To me, this is pretty realistic. Just labeling my cable CAT6 was sort of saying it meets an E/T standard or certified cable. I'm sorry if I didn't explain better. Thanks for the reply; that's my fault.