Hey, can you help me fix my network card?
Hey, can you help me fix my network card?
I have a network with 10 clients that connect to my Windows Server 2016 using ISCSI via a Mikrotik router. The connection is made through UTP Cat 6a cables. On the server, there are online games like Fortnite and LOL running smoothly. My LAN cards are Realtek RTL8111HN Gigabit boards plugged directly onto the motherboard. I need help setting up these cards so they work well with everyone connected. If anyone has had this issue before, please share their experience. Thanks! By default, here is how my board is set: 1-Activation: LAN turned off but enabled. 2-Energy Efficient Ethernet: Turned on. 3-Reception buffers: Set to 512 bytes. 4-Transmission buffers: Set to 128 bytes. 5-Flow control: Both Rx (receive) and Tx (transmit) are on. 6-Gigabit Lite auto-off: Disabled so it stays at full speed. 7-ARP download: Enabled for automatic address checks. 8-Big Send Download v2 IPv4: Turned on to send more data faster. 9-Big Send Download v2 IPv6: Also turned on for newer versions. 10-IPv4 Checksum Offload: Both sides enabled to reduce CPU load. 11-TCP Checksum Offload IPv4: Enabled for better TCP performance. 12-TCP Checksum Offload IPv6: Enabled for future compatibility. 13-UDP Checksum Download IPv4: Turned on to speed up UDP traffic. 14-UDP Checksum Download IPv6: Also turned on. 15-NS Download: Both sides enabled to handle more network segments quickly. 16-Network address: This option is not active or missing from the current settings. 17-Receive side scaling: Enabled so receiving data doesn't slow down everything else. 18-Energy Efficient Ethernet: Turned on. 19-ecological ethernet: Not currently used. 20-Gigabit Lite: Turned off to keep speed at full gigabit rate. 21-Moderation of interruption: Enabled so the system waits for more data before sending. 22-Maximum number of RSS queues: Set to 4 queues. 23-Power Saving Mode: Turned on to save battery while staying fast. 24-Priority and VLAN: Priority VLAN is enabled for important traffic. 25-Reactivate on pattern matching: Enabled so the system wakes up when needed. 26-Reactivate in Magic Packet: Also enabled for faster wake-up times. Note: There was a typo where number 28 should have been 27, but I corrected it to 27 below. 27-Speed and Duplex: Set to Automatic so the connection adjusts itself. 28-Wake on magic packet when system: Disabled.
Just leave them on the default settings because they are already being used. It turns off the hardware feature even though it doesn't do much. In theory, it lowers the CPU load a tiny bit, but since CPUs are so fast, you can't really see any savings. The only things to turn off are energy and power saving options. This won't change how things work or speed up anything, but sometimes these features cause problems if you use long or weak cables. Any "power saving" is too small to matter—you might actually spend more electricity just asking the system to save it when you would have saved that much over the lifetime of the machine.
If you need to use iSCSI and want bigger data chunks sent over the network, turning jumbo frame support on everywhere can make things faster. If that's not what you're doing, just keep everything set to default instead of messing with settings unnecessarily.
Thanks for asking, but I really need to know if UTP Cat 6A can handle up to ten meters. Also, should I run a TCP optimizer just in case? Is this actually necessary or is it just a myth everyone makes up?
Most TCP optimization tools aren't really about network cards. Network cards just handle MAC addresses, so the actual check sums happen in hardware for speed. It's not like CPUs usually have spare cores doing simple math either. What people usually fix is changing things in your OS, like the TCP window size. There are special NICs that do ICS stuff inside a chip, but you won't find them on small setups; they're only used on big data centers right now. Don't worry about this until something actually breaks for you. First, make sure your hard drives and file systems are working fine. Those parts tend to slow things down way more than the network card ever would.