Asus on board NIC problems

IAmATeaf

IAmATeaf

IAmATeaf

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For the last few days I've been getting random disconnects from the internet, system in sig, when using the onboard PCI-E based 80E8056 NIC. I've got the PC wired into a 3Com Gigabit switch, the switch is then connected to my Netgear 834G router. Problem seems completely random in that Vista x64 and the router just seem to stop talking to each other. When the problem occurs I can still ping the PC but can't connect to, the light on the back of the mobo and on the switch remain lit as normal.

I noticed disconnect/reconnect problems when using RDP around a month ago so although my kids have only started complaining over the last few days it seems that the problem has been there for at least a month now. I've tried updating to the latest drivers from Marvells site but no go, tried statis and DHCP addresses and played around with various settings for the card drivers.

Anybody else seen or had this problem?
 
I don't think it's problem with the router as when the PC experiences the problem both a wired and wireless laptop can still access the router and the internet. I've noticed that when the problem occurs, if I try and ping router I get destination host unreachable and Network Center then reports that I only have local connectivity.

I've had a look around the internet and there seem to be a fair few reports of problems with the Marvell Yukon onboard NIC, some say faulty NIC, others say crap Marvell NIC but in both cases the fix seems to be to install a PCI/PCI-E NIC.
 
They may be 'crap' but the same is said about all onboard NICs. Most on-boards are provided by the same handful of companies too.

Have you tried:
using a different port on the switch
connecting directly to the router
the other onboard nic
a different cable
a different OS

When things have been 'happening for a month' and it worked great before, it's more often than not a software issue.
 
There's nothing wrong with onboard NICs at all.
Realtek, Marvell and Intel all do integrated NICs and they all work absolutely fine.
 
yashiro said:
They may be 'crap' but the same is said about all onboard NICs. Most on-boards are provided by the same handful of companies too.

Have you tried:
using a different port on the switch
connecting directly to the router
the other onboard nic
a different cable
a different OS

When things have been 'happening for a month' and it worked great before, it's more often than not a software issue.
Click to expand...

I've tried diff ports on the switch, connected directly to the router and a variety of diff cables. Haven't tried the other NIC so have just enabled it in the BIOS. Trying a diff OS would be a bit of a problem to be honest, not keen on doing this.

You know your last statement is probably true but as the kids use the PC in the main it's difficult to get accurate answers out of them as to when things started going wrong and what they've been doing. :)
 
Well it looks like 1 of the following has sort of fixed the problem in terms of the internet access stopping, the problem with remote desktop is still there though, what I did was:

a) Enable LAN2 but not plugged in
b) Remove all the existing Yukon drives till it backed out to the Microsoft ones then reinstalled the latest from Marvell
c) Disabled all the power saving/energy options for the driver
d) Disabled all the offload options and disabled VLANs for the driver
e) Tided up all the entries associated with the LAN card within the registry, it was up to something like Local Area Connection #16 so just removed all these ghost options that get left in the registry

Used the PC for an hour or so and no interruptions on internet access and my son was on the PC for a few hours last night and no shouting that the internet had stopped.

Not looked at updating the firmware of the NIC yet, don't really want to do this unless I have to. :)
 
Spoke to soon, problem is still there, tried using the second LAN port, again I thought it had fixed the problem but same problem.

To sum the problem up the PC just seems to stop talking to the router, the router is still working fine as other devices can access the router/internet, the PC can still ping other devices.

So it looks like the either the router gives up on the PC or the other way round but there no damned events logged that I can see, any help would be appreciated :)
 
Hey IAmATeaf,

have you tried running your system at stock to see if the NIC error is overclocking related?

If overclocked is your PCI-E frequency locked at 100MHz?
 
PCI-E is locked to either 100 or 101.

Tried a few other things, bypassed my Gigabit switch and connected the PC directly to the router and same problems on both LAN1 and LAN2.

Now I've always used the router as my main DNS lookup so thought I'd try the actual DNS servers that the router uses, set these in my networking setup and although it's too early to say, it looks like it may have improved the situation. When running directly connected to the router I had no disconnects over the last hour so have now switched back to LAN1 and connected to the Gigabit switch.

Are there any websites that say refresh the page every few minutes that I can browse to so that I can glance at the screen to confirm the connection is still there, at the mo I open a few random pages to confirm that I can still access the internet.
 
PCI-E was set to 101 so I've changed it to 100.

Might have to rebuild the damn thing if this doesn't fix it :(
 
Hey IAmATeaf,

I'm working on a Core 2 Duo overclock at high FSB's and ran into a few problems, during basic trouble-shooting I adjusted the PCI-E frequency from 100 to 101 (some people say it helps so thought I'd try), anyways when I booted to Windows the little network icon popped up to inform me there was a problem! :confused:

Now I've used a variety of ASUS boards in overclocked systems over the years and I've haven't manually adjusted the PCI-E frequency before and this was the first time I got that NIC error. The 101 frequency didn't help solve a stability problem I was having so I put it back to 100MHz and when booting back into Windows everything was fine again! :cool:
 
Trying a diff OS would be a bit of a problem to be honest, not keen on doing this.
Click to expand...
It's easy enough. Get http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty/alpha-6/jaunty-desktop-i386.iso burn it to a CD-RW. Boot your PC from the CD. Try and break the connection by browsing and what not.

If it breaks, then you more than likely have an issue unrelated to the OS.
If it doesn't break then you have an OS issue.

When finished, pop the CD out and reboot. No files on your machine are altered during this, it all runs from the CD into ram.
Windows is never changed, nothing is installed.
 
yashiro said:
It's easy enough. Get http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty/alpha-6/jaunty-desktop-i386.iso burn it to a CD-RW. Boot your PC from the CD. Try and break the connection by browsing and what not.

If it breaks, then you more than likely have an issue unrelated to the OS.
If it doesn't break then you have an OS issue.

When finished, pop the CD out and reboot. No files on your machine are altered during this, it all runs from the CD into ram.
Windows is never changed, nothing is installed.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the above, will give it a go in the morning. :)
 
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