Issues with slow internet on a high-end PC despite various solutions.
Issues with slow internet on a high-end PC despite various solutions.
Hello everyone, welcome! This is my debut post, so please be kind. Here are the details of my system: ROG Crosshair VIII Formula MOBO, AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, G.Skill 64GB DDR4 3600 RAM, Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 PCIe M.2 1TB SSD, ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC Edition 11GB GDDR6, WD 1TB HDD, Windows 10 Home 64bit.
Recently, while downloading software to both my PC and laptop, I noticed a big difference in speeds. My laptop was downloading at about 41Mbps, whereas my PC was only around 5-6Mbps (checked via Task Manager). This seemed unusual, so I re-downloaded it and got the same results. When I tried on another machine on the network, speeds were similar but still slow.
I suspected a faulty Ethernet cable, tested a new one, but speeds remained low. I plugged my laptop into the exact same cable and achieved fast downloads, ruling out networking hardware issues. My PC has multiple Ethernet adapters (1G, 5G, Wi-Fi 6), but speeds stayed the same even after driver updates and forcing gigabit duplexing.
I tried several workarounds: using Microsoft Edge instead of Chrome, moving downloads to HDD, updating BIOS/chipsets, disabling antivirus, closing background apps, and even running a speed test via Speedtest.net (about 37Mbps). Downloading from another site gave around 17Mbps sometimes.
I moved the download folder from M.2 to HDD but still got slow speeds. I updated everything—BIOS, chipsets, Windows—but nothing changed. No power-saving features were enabled for the Ethernet cards, and I removed TunnelBear VPN. I’m not missing anything obvious and am running out of ideas.
Could anyone help before considering a full Windows reinstall? Thanks a lot!
what files do you pay for when downloading or uploading? which apps are you installing and where did they come from? platforms such as battle.net and steam offer choices to control bandwidth speed (which i regretfully have to stick to 5Mbps), and these settings aren’t account-wide. do you also use a different network card on your laptop than your pc, and does it support proper drivers?
Thank you for the update. I receive around 40 Mbps from my ISP, and I’ve tested downloading the same file on several devices in my network except my PC. All others succeed, but my PC consistently lags. I’m using the test site https://www.thinkbroadband.com/download. No special NICs are installed on other devices, and my PC has a 1 Gb and 5 Gb Ethernet port along with Wi-Fi 6. Everyone else experiences the same slow download speeds.
I've reinstalled the drivers for all three systems using the newest versions and also tested them directly from Intel's website. I've also updated the BIOS and chipset drivers. What's puzzling is that during a network transfer, it's reaching 800 Mbps as shown in image 4. If the drivers were the issue, speeds should be capped there too?
I just removed the drivers for both the 1 gig and 5 gig ethernet ports, then reinstalled the newest versions from the manufacturers website, but the problem persists. Although speeds have reached 16Mbps now, they’re still far below the 40Mbps others are achieving. I suspect it’s not a driver issue, but possibly a software limitation or a disk performance constraint.
I understand your concern and the inconvenience this is causing. It seems there might be a connection issue between the M.2 drive and the NIC. Someone should investigate whether a software link exists and provide a fix. Appreciate any guidance you can offer! Thanks!