Realtek 8125B 2.5G vs. Intel Gigabit?

[Shou Miko]

I am not sure if this is the right place in the forum for this but here I go....

I am looking for advice because I am not willing to pay like £342 for MSI MEG X570 ACE just to get a Intel I211AT Gigabit nic when the MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WiFi that have a awesome VRM for the price of about £195 which should be great for my current AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and upgrade for ZEN3.

So I been searching for the past few days to see if I can find a good arguement why almost all of MSI's X570 board below the ACE board got Realtek 8125B 2.5G only and not a Intel gigabit nic instead but I cannot really find anything good because Realtek usually got a higher CPU usage than Intel and I don't have any 2.5G switch, router and I cannot get it in my fiberbox anyway and a Intel I211AT insert nic with a green pcb would not look great in my system.

I been looking because I am going to get PCI-E 4.0 for NVME speed which is really the biggest benefit of PCI-E 4.0 and after that graphics card.

The setup I was thinking about since AMD ain't gonna release X670 for Zen 3 for all I read so my new setup would look like this:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Mobo: MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WiFi (Got a VRM that's you usually find on a more expensive board acording to Buildzoid).
SSD: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB (One now and another one later)
GFX: AMD Big Navi or RTX 3080 20GB (Depending on how long I am willing to wait of cause).

 

[newtekie1]

I assume it only has the single 2.5Gb/s NIC because they have to pay for a NIC one way or the other. They are either paying for the Intel 1Gb/s or the Realtek 2.5Gb/s. It is my understanding that the Realtek 2.5Gb/s is about the same price as the Intel 1Gb/s right now. So they get to advertise 2.5Gb/s, and the customer is happy they are getting an improvement. Even if you can't use it right now because you only have 1Gb/s switches, getting the 2.5Gb/s NIC now sets you up for the future. After all, the multi-gigabit switches are getting cheaper. Heck, I just picked up a 4-port 10Gb/s switch for right around $300. And there are switches with 2x10Gb/s ports and 8x1Gb/s ports for under $200. So you can have your home server on the 10Gb/s port, and all the other computers pulling from it at 1Gb/s.

As for the Realtek having higher CPU usage, yes they do. But with any modern processor, you won't even notice the CPU usage. That was an issue back in the 1GHz Pentium days, but today it doesn't matter at all.

 

[CheapMeat]

I'd rather get the 2.5G NIC. Nothing wrong with it driver and reliability wise unless you use some obscure virtualization software or further niche Linux distro. That NIC can still be used for 1G; they're not "locked". You can always add any other NIC card. You can't subtract features, in a way, but you can add.

 

[Shou Miko]

@newtekie1 true MSI paids for the nics everyone does and so far I live alone sadly so I am only using a Asus RT-AC88U and it does actually pull 900-1000Mbps for my gigabit fiber so I am not complaining really.

@CheapMeat for Realtek nics I am glad to hear about drivers does that also go for version 2004 of Windows 10?

I know Lenovo in my country has told me they are looking into their audio issues using Realtek audio and have been for the past 2 weeks but I manage a couple a days ago to fix a customers audio issue on their Lenovo ThinkPad T590 by removing all the Realtek audio driver from Windows 10 v2004 with a driver clean not DDU and restarted the laptop and let Windows 10 update find and install the drivers actually works all this I did remotely because the laptop is in the other end of the country.

Lenovo been out 3 times to try to fix microphone by replacing the wires, mic and motherboard in the laptop.

 

[CheapMeat]

If the Realtek NIC doesn't work with Windows 10 then the board maker should give you a complete refund. It just wouldn't make sense to me to include it and not work with the most popular OS for consumer boards (regardless of version). But as I mentioned you can add a NIC in any PCIe slot too. If you like the board in every other way, a NIC shouldn't stop you. Of course this is my opinion though. I don't have the board myself to verify.

 

[king of swag187]

I'd rather have the Intel NIC for the superior drivers and given lower latency, but if you are going to be using your LAN a lot, then maybe the 2.5GbE is worth it to you

 

[Shou Miko]

I'd rather have the Intel NIC for the superior drivers and given lower latency, but if you are going to be using your LAN a lot, then maybe the 2.5GbE is worth it to you

Would you pay about £147 to get a Intel nic onboard instead of a Realtek when the board to £195 is better value?

I am just trying to get myself overboard on buying the Tomahawk even with the Realtek nic and I believe it will be years before I will use anything faster then gigabit switch, router and fiberboks anyway even it's possible to get 5gigabit (5000/5000 Mbps) fiber in my country as a private person but not where I live.

 

[Chomiq]

I'd rather have the Intel NIC for the superior drivers and given lower latency, but if you are going to be using your LAN a lot, then maybe the 2.5GbE is worth it to you

Been using realtek onboard lan for years. People kept repeating how awesome Intel LAN is. Bought an x570 board with it last year. Didn't notice any difference in day to day stuff. I've never had any problems with realtek, in reality only driver problem I encountered was with Intel which after installing gave me a green tint on screen which went away after rebooting.

 

[TheLostSwede]

There's really nothing wrong with modern Realtek NICs.
They just have really bad rep since the bad old days when they made shite.
I mean, Realtek didn't have to re-spion their silicon for their 2.5Gbps NICs, unlike Intel...
I did some quick performance testing comparing Intel (1Gbps), Realtek (2.5Gbps) and Aquantia (2.5Gbps and up) a while back and threw it up here. This is obviously mainly for data throughput, but Realtek beat Aquantia at 2.5Gbps. I guess I didn't think about running anything but Intel at 1Gbps, but hey...

Quick comparison, 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps, 10Gbps Ethernet

Note that this test is limited by the fact that the target is a mechanical hard drive, even if it's a NAS drive. The NAS also has an Aquantia 10Gbps card in it. This is obviously not a thorough test, but I wanted to see how the Realtek 2.5Gbps chip performed. Take this for what it is, a quick...

www.techpowerup.com

I can't find any more thorough test either. This is the best test I could find of the Realtek chips. No-one seems to have tested the Intel ones, yet.

TRENDnet 2.5Gbase-T PCIe Adapter Review TEG-25GECTX

Our TRENDnet TEG-25GECTX review shows how this 2.5Gbase-T PCIe x1 adapter delivers great performance for those looking to upgrade machines to 2.5GbE speeds

www.servethehome.com

Would you pay about £147 to get a Intel nic onboard instead of a Realtek when the board to £195 is better value?

I am just trying to get myself overboard on buying the Tomahawk even with the Realtek nic and I believe it will be years before I will use anything faster then gigabit switch, router and fiberboks anyway even it's possible to get 5gigabit (5000/5000 Mbps) fiber in my country as a private person but not where I live.

Absolutely not. I simply wouldn't worry about it.

 

[tabascosauz]

I am looking for advice because I am not willing to pay like £342 for MSI MEG X570 ACE just to get a Intel I211AT Gigabit nic when the MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WiFi that have a awesome VRM for the price of about £195 which should be great for my current AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and upgrade for ZEN3.

On a strictly 1Gbe connection like you've said, I don't think you can go wrong with either 1Gbe Intel or 2.5Gbe Realtek. Regarding CPU usage, we're pairing 6/8/12/16 core CPUs with the boards that have either of these NICs like, come on. The "Realtek bad" comments were all from the 1Gbe Realtek era, where the latency and throughput actually wasn't that great compared to Intel at the time.

I have the RTL8125B in my B550 mATX, the RTL8125BG (the weird "Dragon" variant) in my B550 ITX, and a tossup of i211 and i217 in every other older desktop I still use. All of them work fine at up to Gigabit connections.

It was the early Intel i225 2.5Gbe NICs that had serious problems with throughput, but Intel has been putting out a number of hardware steppings that should be showing up in motherboards round about now. But so far, it's also been Intel 2.5 that's been having issues on the driver side. A few months ago, a bunch of users on various Asus and Gigabyte boards had unusable ethernet due to the faulty drivers on 1.0.1.4-1.0.1.7 and had to rollback to 1.0.1.3. Intel probably ended up patching the problem later in a new release - it's up to 1.0.1.8 now.

In terms of the board, the Tomahawk is excellent value and performance. Now you know there's no reason to hold back on account of the NIC. 1Gbe Intel and 2.5Gbe Realtek + AX201 wifi are winning networking combinations right now.