Windows 7 system doesn't enjoy 1Gbps bandwidth while my other system does.

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lamlamit

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Feb 4, 2018
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Hello,
I have a fiberoptic 1 Gbps connection and Speedtest results vary from 250 to 600 Mbps.
After replacing the modem and cable as my ISP that provides the equipment suggested, it remained the same. My motherboard is equipped with a Gigabit chip (Realtek) and I work with Windows 7 Professional. Yesterday I installed a new iMac for a dedicated job and hooked it up to the same modem with the same cable and got more than 950 Mbps which is for me is enough.
This means that the speed at the end of the Ethernet cable is much higher than the results I get on my Windows system. I tried installing the latest driver from Realtek website, impose 1000Mbps in the configuration parameters but nothing gets me to the available speed while giving me unstable results. I did a lot of reading and most issues are of communication blocked at 100Mbps which sometime requires a certain manipulation to enable 1G. This is not my case. I'm somewhere in the middle while one system enjoy the full bandwidth and the other not.
An ideas?
 
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You do not have to hook them directly together. The lan ports on the router act as a switch and will not slow the traffic....I suppose if you do not get full speed you could test directly to eliminate that as a possibility.

One you get into the internals of the PC it is a massively complex thing to find. Any single thing in your machine should be able to run at 1gbit. The example most people know of is if you copy a single large file it goes much faster than copying 10000 tiny files even though they take up the same space. We know that it is related to the overhead of creating all the files but if you were to try to say find what exactly part of the computer that is really doing it is very hard.

In most cases issue with...
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bill001g

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If another device can get the tested speed then it has to be the PC. Be careful to use the beta version of the speedtest. The one that uses flash can not get full speed because of the overhead in the flash.

If you still have issues try a old line mode command called IPERF. There are version for just about any OS. This is a extremely simplistic tool that does not use disk and uses extremely small memory and CPU so it pretty much tests just the network. You should get in the 900+mbits/sec between your machines.

If this does not work then it is likely a driver issue. If IPERF works then it is likely a bottleneck in the OS.
 
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lamlamit

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Thanks for the advice, however I went through all the docs and tutorials i could find on IPERF and it seems it's designated to test comm between two devices I can control. Make one of them a server. What I need is to test the speed to the internet. My other computer connects fine. I need to measure only the one that doesn't enjoy the full bandwidth. Speedtest app on the iMac gets to 950Mbps and up without a problem. The Windows app as well as the online Speedtes website (and others I tested) give me much lower results.





 
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bill001g

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I know it is your PC the mac working pretty much says your internet and router are fine.

The purpose of running iperf is to see if you need to be trying to fix network drivers or if the problem is someplace else in the OS.

You can blindly try stuff I suppose. You may end up doing that anyway if iperf says everything is good. You might see something interesting in the resource monitor...I think win7 had that. You are looking for cpu/memory/disk utilization to maybe give you a clue.
 
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lamlamit

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How do you suggest I use IPREF to rule out NIC or drivers. What command? Against what destination should I run it so I'll get a response. It needs a server ready in the other side (My ISP or near it).

I forgot to mention that I tested it also in Safe Mode, which means only the very basic processes were active but the result was similar.
 
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bill001g

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Iperf is simple. One end you do iperf -s On the other you type iperf -c xx.xx.xx.xx Where xx.xx.xx.xx is the of your other machine.

There are lots of options to test certain kinds of traffic but the basic test is all you need to test bandwidth.

Your issue is very strange. It is pretty easy to overload a router on gigabit connection, you can not use any of the fancy features. Since your imac works fine it eliminates the most common cause of a complaint like yours. Be sure there are no firewall/QoS settings in the router for your machine...but generally just turning these features on degrades all machines.

The other one you tend to see is people who have killer nic chipset. These have lots of strange issues with the drivers because of the so called "gamer" accelerator.






 
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lamlamit

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Feb 4, 2018
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Thanks again.
So what you are suggesting is that I disconnect my set-top box / router, hook my Mac as a server and run IPERF between them (as I ruled out any problem with external devices).
My NIC chipset is a regular Gigabit Realtek with recent drivers and I did mild overclocking when setting up the system 6 years ago, but to my CPU, not the NIC. I'm not a gamer but I need as much power as I can squeeze from this workstation that is used for professional video editing.
The Mac was an addition for a new film that has already 5 years Mac legacy so it was wiser not to switch to my older Windows workstation and buy a new iMac with lots of memory and a newer generation i7 CPU.

Can the system drive (SSD), which is close to its limit, influence network performances (or accurate measurement) in your opinion?
 
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bill001g

Titan
Aug 9, 2012
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125,640
You do not have to hook them directly together. The lan ports on the router act as a switch and will not slow the traffic....I suppose if you do not get full speed you could test directly to eliminate that as a possibility.

One you get into the internals of the PC it is a massively complex thing to find. Any single thing in your machine should be able to run at 1gbit. The example most people know of is if you copy a single large file it goes much faster than copying 10000 tiny files even though they take up the same space. We know that it is related to the overhead of creating all the files but if you were to try to say find what exactly part of the computer that is really doing it is very hard.

In most cases issue with speedtest are more a problem with the browser than with the actual machine. Before they stopped using flash for speedtest the flash code limited the maximum speed.

You could I suppose try something like steam and download some large free game. Problem is steam sometime does not download at full speed because of load on their end.

Maybe a simple fileshare and copy files between your machines in the house.


 
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