PCA Forums

I moved over my gaming to a different rig running win7 with 4 gigs of ram and the new GTX 660 video card. Performance is excellent since I only play TF2.

On this rig, I have a Netgear switch so I have 4 additional ports on top of my desk. I use the additional ports for when I'm working on someone's laptop, or if I'm working from home I plug in the laptop to the docking station. All this stuff sits on top of my desk. I did this so I would not have to pull the RJ45 cable from the back of the PC. My connection is FIOS.

Last night I was playing for ~2 hours, then I noticed pauses in the game play with the red warning that I was losing connection. It has done this pretty much every time I jump on the PC to play TF2.

I have updated the NIC drivers that are built into the mobo. Still the same issue. I thought that I may have a heat issue, so I put a fan in front of the mid tower and no change. I swapped out the Netgear with 2 different switches, one use and one brand new still in the box with the same results.

Could this be the NIC in the mobo going south? If so, what would be a good replacement card?

Onboard NICs are often not the greatest, and yeah I've seen them fail. An add-on NIC card is pretty cheap, and will at least eliminate that possibility.

Also, check your cables. Maybe you have a bad patch cord.

My onboard NIC went south and I bought a replacement at Newegg - an intel model with some cache on it for like $25. Works fine, can't really tell if it's faster since my connection is pretty slow.

Had a Linksys PCI card that I used, and that seemed to fix the issue. I was able to play for hours with no issues.

Unfortunately, most cheap NICs aren't much better than on-board ones. I've had issues with some on-board ones, in some cases where they tend to corrode and the connection becomes unreliable. This seems to happen more often in places exposed to a decent amount of humidity.

I have had to replace a switch recently as though it wouldn't drop connections, the devices connected to it just ran really slowly. Sometimes it is just a matter of what might you have changed, drivers being the largest concern. Uninstalling and Reinstalling the drivers might have taken care of it. Best way to remove the device of concern though, is just hook another computer to the switch.

Sometimes it just one of those things. Even though motherboards come with Gigabit ethernet, there aren't many good reasons to not use it. My biggest worry is risk of damage from power surges and lightning strikes is higher with an on-board adapter rather than using a card.