Why is there a difference in speed?
Why is there a difference in speed?
I have an old HP laptop with a 1gbs network card inside. I upgraded the CPU and RAM to max specs at AMD using a 3080k and 8gb of memory. I also built a new PC with an Aorus Pro AX motherboard, which has an onboard 2.5gb link speed, paired with a Ryzen 9 7950x processor and 128gb of RAM. I don't know how to check the network speed on my laptop because it has an i7-8565u and 32gb of memory, so maybe it's just not getting all that much data yet. If a computer has enough hardware like that, it should be able to get at least a 1gbs connection. Both new computers are running on Windows 10 and the speed test shows around 100mbs, while the old HP with Windows 7 can reach about 500mbs. My internet provider says they give gigabit speeds, but I'm still confused why my two newer machines aren't getting close to that speed. Any ideas?
Click on the network icon and check the status window. Microsoft changed this a little bit, so it's hard to know exactly where to look depending on your version of Windows. You should see your connection speed. It usually says something like 1 gigabit or 1000 megabits per second. If you see 100 megabits per second instead, you probably have a bad cable. The ports that are really fast (2.5G) don't care much if the cable isn't the right size. Also, lots of fake cables are being sold online. You might see flat cables with wires too small to actually work for Ethernet. Even if it's just a broken cable from a real brand, it could be bad too. All you need are Cat5e cables made of pure copper without extra stuff (CCA) and the wire size between 22 and 24. That flat stuff is either 30 or 33 millimeters wide. The bigger number means thinner wires.
I made all those routers myself. There were two coming back from the router, so I moved them to different rooms in my house. When I plugged one into a second new router, I couldn't get more than 100 Mbps on either system. This old router has been used way too many times, so I got rid of it and bought three brand new ones instead.
I recently bought a switch to save me from all that messy wiring. So I plugged the cable into my old computer and made sure everything was working fine before feeding the switch. The new routers are much shorter than the one in the box. They use Cat 5e with 24 AWG copper wire. The only change is the feed line looks white, but it doesn't say if it's thicker or thinner. I don't think it's any different though; I guess it's still around 24 AWG.
The new router says "100" on my status page, but when I try to bridge that connection, I get 368.8 Mbps. However, a speed test shows about 80 Mbps. This is probably just peak usage time because the internet service provider isn't always at full capacity.
My old laptop can't bridge either way; it says I need two connections without sharing them. I used to try setting up remote desktop back when and turned on all possible sharing settings, but nothing changed. Now that I have off connection sharing and don't share any folders with my network, the bridge still won't work.
The only thing I haven't tried yet is plugging in the feed cable directly into one of the new routers. It's just too long to reach there. Maybe I can find an extension cord somewhere or plug one of the new machines into the old one and see if it keeps that 100 Mbps rating. I'm going to test that setup and update this post with the results.
Sometimes the old computer still gets really fast speeds even if you plug in with an old cable. I'd thought it was backwards, but my new machine actually gets faster on wifi. That extra speed comes from a bridge that turns ethernet into 100 megahertz speed.
When your internet speed says 100 mbps, you likely have a broken port or a bad cable. Bad cables might work on some computers but fail on others; some machines handle out-of-spec cables better than others. There is no way to fix a bad port; that's all about hardware voltages and connections. Maybe you hard-coded the setting for 100 mbps in your settings, but everything else is done through hardware. You can't really change it by loading software on top of that.
You still think it's the cable? Outside of buying a long one and not knowing if they sell them in any length or size, I didn't check either. I don't know what else to do. I took those cables straight from a box full of new ones and followed the standard way of twisting them like the one that works well. Guys working on jobs told me it doesn't matter as long as both ends are the same. But some are twisted more than others, so I looked this one up instead of just picking randomly. These are brand new right out of the box. I don't know what else to try unless installing a driver changed my bandwidth somehow, or if something software-wise limited me intentionally.
It looks like one of the wires inside an end is just touching partway, not fully. You can figure out which cable to test by looking at the lights on your screen. Sadly, you'll still have to guess which end to check. When it works fast (100mbps) and you're using standard colored cables, it's often that blue or brown pair. Use a magnifier to look really closely; if the wire doesn't go all the way into the jack, that might be the problem. It's common to get a bad connection if the wires aren't pushed in deep enough. For long permanent cables, easier is to use keystone jacks and then short cheap cables from the jack straight to the machine. You can handle one wire at a time instead of trying to align all eight perfectly. You can also pull them out and re-punch them. These new tools make keystones without needing any special tools. Just double-check the settings and make sure it's set to auto, but if a port is really bad, you'll need to buy a USB or PCIe device to swap it out.
I'm sorry, but that topic is still open for discussion. My family has died recently, so I can't focus much else right now. I really think none of the ports are broken; the tool I used works fine for 45 and 11s. I will use a magnifying glass to look closely at them later. What settings do you mean? Could you tell me exactly where to find those options? I didn't know you could turn off bandwidth or set it to auto mode. I just thought that was the default setting.