Poor gigabit ethernet speeds with PC can't figure out cause

[PingSpike]

I have a A88x motherboard and I can only get about 22MB/s copying files to it. This happens with a few different XP installs as well as the same machine running unraid.

I figured it was the cheap realtek NIC, I put in a Intel 1000 PT dual port pci-e card and I get the same speeds.

I figured it was the cable. I plug the exact same cable into my PC and get 90MB/s copying the same files.

I replaced the cable anyway, still 22MB/s.
I plugged it into a different wall jack and moved the entire PC thinking maybe there was some weird interference, still 22MB/s.

I changed all the power options in the BIOS, still 22MB/s.

I just ran TCP Optimizer out of desperation and I'm actually getting worse performance, 17MB/s.

I'm pretty out of ideas...can a motherboard cause slow network transfers? I changed cards, OSes, cables. About all I have left is rolling back to a previous bios but I doubt that's going to work.

 

[aigomorla]

if i recall, XP has always had bad file transfer rates.

Also to rule out I/O speed on the drives, have you tried connecting a USB3.0 drive to it and checking out how fast the transfer rate is locally?
Or transfer rate from drive to drive locally.

 

[sdifox]

Try the program fastcopy.

http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

 

[VirtualLarry]

Do you have AMD's "Fast Stream" driver enabled?

It shows up in your network driver stack as "AppEx Network Accelerator". They should have called it "Decelerator". Disable / uninstall or otherwise remove it. It sucks, and slows down gigabit ethernet connectors to slow speeds, like you're seeing.

It's bundled with AMD drivers.

http://www.techsupportforum.com/for...l-will-squash-your-internet-speed-877593.html

I had exactly the same problem. After troubleshooting my network connection for an entire day, it turned out that AppEx Networks Accelerator was slowing down my connection from 190 Mbps to 4 Mbps!! After disabling AppEx Networks "Accelerator" the speed was amazing.

 

[PingSpike]

So I think in the end this was just me being dumb. aigomorla more or less nailed the cause I believe. The old crappy hard drives I was using to test this were older and crappier than I had thought. They were holding back the network connection. I'd actually thought the disk performance could be the culprit and had tried a spare SATA card but for some reason I brain farted and didn't think to blame the disks themselves. Running crystaldiskmark on them revealed they could be a big problem. Basically, gigabit ethernet is faster than I thought and hard disk performance in general is slower than I thought...particularly old crappy hard drives that I only use for testing these days.

I installed a 256GB SSD to remove that as a bottleneck and then used that fastcopy program sdifox suggested. I was getting 70MB/s and 98MB/s send and receiving. Which is good.

One sort of interesting thing is that the intel gigabit NIC I had to test actually performs worse than the onboard realtek.