Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller model
Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller model
I have a Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller. My internet occasionally drops, especially on my computer. I checked the Event Viewer and saw frequent resets—specifically, the network interface reset 60 times in a short period, with three errors occurring within half an hour. I’ve already updated the drivers, but the warning says "Windows has determined that the best driver is already installed."
It's very unlikely to be a driver issue. It's a realtek gigabit chip, the same chip that's used on motherboards for maybe 10+ years now. They got the drivers right by now. You have an error message which is clear: "The network driver detected that its hardware has stopped responding to commands. This network interface has reset 60 time(s) since it was last initialized." That could be caused by several things - all these are possibilities, not saying this is the fault. 1. Bad ethernet cable or cable that's going bad. It shouldn't happen, network cards are designed in such a way so that if a cable fails, there's no problems, but still in very rare cases it can happen. Maybe for some reason, the cable is broken in such a way that once in a while, some data packets get corrupted in such a way that they cause the network card to try to reset itself or to try to downgrade the speed to 100 mbps and that fails, causing a reset. Try just replacing the ethernet cable with a new one and see if that repeats. 2. If you use a long ethernet cable, or a cable that's CCA (copper clad aluminum), go in device manager at your network card at advanced properties and disable any power saving feature. Even if you use a regular cable, try to disable these power saving features On my card, you can see there Energy Efficient Ethernet and Green Ethernet - you can set those to Disabled and restart PC. It will make the network card consume maybe 0.1w..0.25w more compared to the default modes, because the card now sends stronger signal, as if you had up to 100 meters of network cable. Before, the chip reduces transmission power if it detects a short cable to save a bit of power. 3. The chip and the components it needs are typically placed on motherboard in the area where the video card sits. It's rare, but has happened in the past for someone to accidentally scratch or knock some components off when inserting the video card, by touching the motherboard with the metal bracket of the video card. There are some components which have the role of filtering the energy going into the chip, so without those the network card could still work but once in a while the quality of the energy coming into the chip could go down and cause the chip to reset itself. 4. Maybe your power supply is failing. Your motherboard may power the network card chip directly from 3.3v from your power supply, and your power supply's 3.3v output may be sub-par or bad, causing the chip to randomly reset itself. It the power quality is bad, disabling those power saving features of the network card may cause an increased number of resets, because now the network chip consumes a bit more power.
I'll attempt to swap out the Ethernet cable. It also occurs when I open many tabs at once (my computer remains stable).