Realtek RTL6168 PCI-E NIC's

[bnborg]

I bought a couple of these with the Rosewill brand from Newegg, thinking I would replace the existing PCI cards in my two Hyper-V servers. They use MSI 870A-G54 motherboards.

I figured using PCI-E would reduce CPU overhead, etc. I chose these cards because they had the same chip as the onboard one on the motherboard.

There is no way I could get the new NIC's to work. I tried everything I could think of, disabling the onboard ethernet, trying different slots, resetting CMOS and removing power every attempt. Windows either did not see the PCI-E card at all, or else it would report that there were no resources assigned to the card. Indeed, pausing the screen at the end of POST and reading the information screen would show no IRQ assigned to it when it did show it.

Does anyone have any experience with cards like this, or with the AMD 870 chipset? Does anyone have any ideas why this happens?

 

[tipstir]

I bought a couple of these with the Rosewill brand from Newegg, thinking I would replace the existing PCI cards in my two Hyper-V servers. They use MSI 870A-G54 motherboards.

I figured using PCI-E would reduce CPU overhead, etc. I chose these cards because they had the same chip as the onboard one on the motherboard.

There is no way I could get the new NIC's to work. I tried everything I could think of, disabling the onboard ethernet, trying different slots, resetting CMOS and removing power every attempt. Windows either did not see the PCI-E card at all, or else it would report that there were no resources assigned to the card. Indeed, pausing the screen at the end of POST and reading the information screen would show no IRQ assigned to it when it did show it.

Does anyone have any experience with cards like this, or with the AMD 870 chipset? Does anyone have any ideas why this happens?

What model did you get?

NIC ROSEWILL RC-401-EX GIGABIT PCI-E RETAIL (red PCB)

I got 3x of these

StarTech ST1000SPEX 1 Port PCI Express 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter Card This is like your Roswill except for the blue PCB color and yours being red. No good can cause junk packets sent back to your router causing 100 or more re-conections or causes the system to hault under Windows 7 64-bit OS U.

Don't bother one died within 1 year the other two were replacements one won't worked and just ended up sending both back. They only have 128KB TX / 128KB RX where the one I have on the board has 256KB TX / 256KB RX. Big performance difference. If you got PCI bus those works better and stable the PCI Express version seems to have issues. I think the IBM looks like the same deal in the image shots.

IBM 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet Low Profile PCI Express Adapter
$8 bucks

Intel chip one cost $38 bucks
Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter. RJ-45 Connectors. 10/100/1000BASE-T.

Might give it a shot on that system I have to use PCI TP-LINK 10/100/1000Base
PCI 64 bits 133 MHz 1 GBps on 8GB / 2.5GHz Quad core. It quick since it does my IIS

Dual Direction PCI-E would have double that of the PCI 32-bit bus. Intel one would be the way to go if you need one.

 

[bnborg]

Mine are the RC-411. As far as Intel goes they have been known to use Realtek in some of their economy cards. From the .inf file:

%RTL8168C.DeviceDesc% = RTL8168C.ndi, PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_434E8086&REV_02 ;INTEL

.

But I think my problem is with the moterboard/chipset/BIOS.

 

[tipstir]

Mine are the RC-411. As far as Intel goes they have been known to use Realtek in some of their economy cards. From the .inf file:

.

But I think my problem is with the moterboard/chipset/BIOS.

That's just goes to how things are today. Realtek when it comes to drivers and you run a Network business like I do here, you can be sure they well bend over backwards to get you what you need from Twain. Which they did for me. But a lot of the PCI-E cards seem to be failing too fast. Intel design and still it has issues. PCI-X more for business than for home usage. Still tap into those speeds.

What type of system you have for your PCI-E slots?

 

[bnborg]

Thanks, tipstir.

As I said in my first post, these two machines use MSI 870A-G54 motherboards, which have three PCI slots, one short PCI-E slot, and two long PCI-E slots. The second long PCI-E slot only supports PCI-E x 4.

I am using Windows Server 2008 R2. They each have 16 GB of DDR3 1333, a Phenom II x6 1090T CPU and four or five hard drives.