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2.5g upgrade realtek rtl8125b vs intel i226-v windows

C

cerulliber

Joined
Jul 9, 2021
Messages
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greeting,
looking forward to upgrade my on-board 1gb lan to match isp speed. local stores no luck, geizhals.de nothing mighty. via aliexpress managed to get

realtek rtl8125b
intel i226-v

which one is better for daily overall windows experience and easy to download driver?

is something better on budget-wise for europeans shoppers?

I would like not to overspend over 20-30$ excluding transport for only one port (don't need much).

thanks!
 
Not sure where you are living, but I assume Austria or Germany? You'll probably find some 2.5Gb PCIe x1 cards from the likes of TP-Link, TRENDnet, AXAGON, DeLOCK, etc. for €20 to €30 at most online retailers in that area. At least your local Amazon should have some of those.
 
I can find axagon which is still realtek rtl8125b and 4x price of aliexpress which is dumb and greed.

so realtek rtl8125b or intel i226-v ?
 
look for intels 10gb networls on ebay. intel 540, 520 or 720. they are pci-e x4 or x8 but are monsters in perfoemance
 
cerulliber said:
rtl8125b or intel i226-v
Click to expand...
Doesn't really matter for home use. Realteks work usually out of the box, for Intel you might have to manually install drivers. I got both in my environment, and that's pretty much the biggest difference I noticed.
 
RTL8126 5Gbe

ACQ113 for 10Gbe

Intel? No...
 
If I was choosing a motherboard and saw it had the I-225V or I-226V NIC, I'd probably avoid them and choose another motherboard after my experience with the former. Supposedly Intel has some good NICs (perhaps the ones mentioned above), but the I-226V isn't one of them.

I had the I-225V on my previous motherboard and it was problematic. Hosting a Minecraft instance on said PC as a server would bring the entire network connection down once an outside player connected to it and it would remain down until the PC was restarted. This didn't happen if I used the (also Intel) WiFi, or another two PCs entirely which had different NICs. It was at that point that I started doing some research and found a lot of others with the same NIC on a range of motherboards reporting the same thing. It wasn't Minecraft crashing... the NIC was crashing. I couldn't believe it, of all things. Went down rabbit holes of trying to change NIC settings/driver versions and nothing worked to stop it. Further research taught me that there was three hardware revisions of that NIC and they all had a range of issues beyond the one I was experiencing, but random cutouts/drops was the prime one. Motherboard makers would of course not offer support if you were impacted by this because even though they chose to use said NIC in their product, as far as they were concerned, it was an Intel/NIC/driver problem, and... Intel did nothing but revise it in later hardware (which does nothing for those already affected) and this still failed to fully resolve the issues. Funny enough, that whole approach of sweeping it under the rug and moving on was foreshadowing the same response they later showed with the recent Alder Lake CPU issues.

Later on, I was seeing article after article (one here on TechPowerUp) that the successor I-226V was having issues too!? How after three revisions and a successor does it have those same issues? I'm not sure how much of that may have been resolved since then, but if it's anything like the I-225V was, I'd just avoid it.

On the other hand... Realtek has also had its share of mediocre and problematic NICs and drivers over the years. I don't know if the one you mentioned is one of them though.
 
Princess Garnet said:
If I was choosing a motherboard and saw it had the I-225V or I-226V NIC, I'd probably avoid them and choose another motherboard after my experience with the former. Supposedly Intel has some good NICs (perhaps the ones mentioned above), but the I-226V isn't one of them.

I had the I-225V on my previous motherboard and it was problematic. Hosting a Minecraft instance on said PC as a server would bring the entire network connection down once an outside player connected to it and it would remain down until the PC was restarted. This didn't happen if I used the (also Intel) WiFi, or another two PCs entirely which had different NICs. It was at that point that I started doing some research and found a lot of others with the same NIC on a range of motherboards reporting the same thing. It wasn't Minecraft crashing... the NIC was crashing. I couldn't believe it, of all things. Went down rabbit holes of trying to change NIC settings/driver versions and nothing worked to stop it. Further research taught me that there was three hardware revisions of that NIC and they all had a range of issues beyond the one I was experiencing, but random cutouts/drops was the prime one. Motherboard makers would of course not offer support if you were impacted by this because even though they chose to use said NIC in their product, as far as they were concerned, it was an Intel/NIC/driver problem, and... Intel did nothing but revise it in later hardware (which does nothing for those already affected) and this still failed to fully resolve the issues. Funny enough, that whole approach of sweeping it under the rug and moving on was foreshadowing the same response they later showed with the recent Alder Lake CPU issues.

Later on, I was seeing article after article (one here on TechPowerUp) that the successor I-226V was having issues too!? How after three revisions and a successor does it have those same issues? I'm not sure how much of that may have been resolved since then, but if it's anything like the I-225V was, I'd just avoid it.

On the other hand... Realtek has also had its share of mediocre and problematic NICs and drivers over the years. I don't know if the one you mentioned is one of them though.
Click to expand...
There was a nice thread on TPU about this awhile back. The trend seemed to be with motherboard integrated versions of these chips having problems. I believe someone reported add-in card seemed fine and another reported feedback turning off the checkbox for the device to save power helped them with their onboard nic. For the 2.5Gbps NICs setting the speed to 1Gbps might help when connecting to some 1Gbps switches.

Still if given a choice I'd go with whatever chips or devices have the least amount of reported problems.
 
The Krull said:
look for intels 10gb networls on ebay. intel 540, 520 or 720. they are pci-e x4 or x8 but are monsters in perfoemance
Click to expand...
They also don't do anything less than 10gbps on many models and his isp is probably doing a subspeed like 2.5gbps, which they won't support (they'll fallback to 1gbps in this scenario).

This is at least true for 520s and 540s.

From your choices I'd go realtek because the intel consumer solutions are a buggy minefield.
 
I recently ordered a network card using the RTL8125B chip (2.5Gbps) from AliExpress and got one with an RTL8111E chip (1Gbps) instead. Complained about it but AliExpress declared the complaint invalid. Apparently, providing pictures of the card and the anti-static bag clearly showing 8111E wasn't proof enough. Luckily, the card cost next to nothing.
 
Thanks got 5gb card for futureproof so I don’t have to buy twice. Now wait for isp to sell 5g lan subscriptions. 10g already on business, but on consumer scales same company don’t compete, even infrastructure is ready and capable excepting switches. Now looking forward an router 2.5g lan with vpn. Prefere something that isn’t made by a chinese company.
 
cerulliber said:
Thanks got 5gb card for futureproof so I don’t have to buy twice. Now wait for isp to sell 5g lan subscriptions. 10g already on business, but on consumer scales same company don’t compete, even infrastructure is ready and capable excepting switches. Now looking forward an router 2.5g lan with vpn. Prefere something that isn’t made by a chinese company.
Click to expand...
That 5 Gbps card is also a lot more power efficient than the 10 Gbps cards on the market today, as it only uses a little bit more power than a 2.5 Gbps chip.
 
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