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Evil Realtek ...

txxxx

Golden Member
Lately ive replaced my K7N2 nforce2 board for another gigabyte 7N400-L.

It came with the Realtek NIC onboard, which at first did annoy me, but since I dont hammer the LAN too much, its ok.

Earlier I noticed invisible (i.e. no processes) CPU usage of 15-25% when 1mbit~ of data was passing the network.

Flicked into device manager as I remembered how the nForce ethernet allowed CPU cycle saving, and noticed there's an "optimal performance" mode. So I set that as you'd expect.

Also noticed that you could enlarge the recieve buffer to 64KBytes. Did that too.

CPU util has now dropped to just background noise (0-5% variable) when downloading @1mbit/s ....

But why didnt realtek bother setting these in the first place? Kind of annoying as I got the drivers directly from realtek.

Just a little note of warning for anyone else who's wondering...
 
I have a 7N400-L in my other rig. The MS driver is used for the Realtek 8139 onboard nic.

date: 7/1/2001
version: 5.396.530.2001

I have the 3.13 nForce drivers loaded. My duplex mode is set to auto, and the buffer size is 64Kb. I transferred ~750MB of data across my home lan and saw a 25 - 40% cpu usage. I ran the same test on my NF7-S v2 w/ NVIDIA MCP (optimize for cpu, full autonegotation) and saw 10-25% cpu usage.

I decided to update my 7N400-L latest drivers on Gigabyte's website.

date: 1/12/2004
version: 5.611.1231.2003

Cpu usage went down to 18-30%
 
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