Encore ENLGA-1320 / Realtek 8169 NIC won't link at 1000mbps

[fredweston]

I just bought an Encore ENLGA-1320 NIC, which I believe uses the Realtek 8169 chipset. Trouble is, I can't seem to get it to connect to anything at 1000mbps.

I don't have a gig switch at home yet, but my desktop has two built-in GbE ports. I tried connecting to both of them using a crossover cable but the best it would do is 100mbps. So then I thought it might be a bad cable, but when I connect the two onboard NICs together with the same crossover cable, they linked right up at 1000mbps.

Just to be sure it wasn't the cable, I took out the crimper and made a crossover cable. It still didn't work with the new NIC, but worked fine with my two onboard NICs at 1000mbps just like the other cable did.

I tried manually setting the speed/duplex option of the new NIC to 1000mbps full duplex, but still no go.

So, I've run out of things to try. Any ideas?

 

[mberkhan]

Having a similar problem and found this post during a Google search. It's several months old, but thought I'd reply incase anyone else in the same boat comes across it.

My advice is to buy another card. I bought it because it was $10 on Newegg. It wouldn't do 1000mbps until I tweeked some windows settings. Then the speed shot up to what I'd expect from a gigabit card. That lasted about a week then the speeds dropped again and nothing up to and including reinstalling windows has gotten it to work again. By default windows install a driver that's 2 years old for the card. The 'official' driver from Encores website is 2 years older than that. The best I've been able to do is to set the card to 100full-duplex. It seems to be OK at that speed (transfers are 10x the spped I got when it was set to 1gig), so that'll last until I'm motivated enough to replace the card with something that works.