PSA: Windows 10 and i210s do not seem to mix very well

[Ericloewe]

Just going to leave here what little information I've gathered so far, since I don't have the time to troubleshoot this in-depth at the moment:

I was going to test a 1000BaseLX/1000BaseT media converter's performance using iperf between my workstation and one of my servers, starting with a simple control test. That's when I got the rather nasty surprise of only seeing 700ish Mb/s throughput (I'd previously gotten 900-950, as expected).

After some messing around, I discovered that only the i210 GbE controller on my workstation was acting up. The i217 does low 900s Mb/s, which isn't too unusual, and the servers do mid 900s Mb/s between their i210s. Intel's latest drivers for Windows 10 changed nothing. Same goes for trying the second switch.

Here're the details:

Workstation:
Windows 10
Xeon E5 1650 v3
16GB RAM
ASRock X99 WS (1x i210 and 1x i217)

Servers:
FreeNAS 9.3.1/9.10
i3 4330/6300
X10SLM+-F/X11SSM-F (i210s all around)
16GB RAM

Switches:
Brand-new Netgear GS724T (my first suspect)
Old El-Cheapo 5-port TP-Link switch.

I'll update this when I've researched this properly.

 

[cyberjock]

This seems quite odd IMO.

Intel usually has very, very good drivers on the Windows side. While not impossible for some nasty bug to slip through, I would be rather surprised if Intel didn't do a quick release update for their drivers.

Have you tried the new Intel Driver Update tool at http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html?iid=dc_iduu ? I found this to be better than trying to find the driver myself. :P

I used this last week and it worked well for my laptop (Intel display driver and Intel NIC).

 

[Ericloewe]

This seems quite odd IMO.

Oh yeah, that's why I immediately gravitated towards the switch.

Have you tried the new Intel Driver Update tool at http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html?iid=dc_iduu ? I found this to be better than trying to find the driver myself. :p

I'll try, but I had no problem finding the driver, which was from a couple of days ago, I think. Maybe it's a weird interaction with the ME and a ME driver update would help, since the i210 allows for the kind of trickery that the i217/8/9s tend not to allow (though my motherboard does have the vPro-compatible i217LM).