Intermittent NIC failure

devoir

I'm getting sporadic link loss on my desktop NIC. Everything else connected to the same switch is fine and the router itself handles traffic between other devices without an issue.

I've powercycled the switch, changed ports, swapped cables, restarted my desktop, updated drivers, run the manufacturer's diagnostic on it, everything checks out.

On the desktop itself, it shows up as cable disconnected when the rest of the network can't connect to it.

While I was writing this post, it turns out that the Marvell Yukon series (it came onboard, I wouldn't have gone out of my way to buy a Marvell) is well known for its crapness.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to actually fix the card from seeing a dropped link all the time, that'd be great, otherwise I'll get another tomorrow at work.

Ego

I've come across that problem often enough on cheap onboard units (usually on really low end mobos) though it's less common these days. Generally it means 'go get a PCI NIC', unfortunately.

devoir

Roger. I suffered through two episodes of 24 streaming from that PC to my 360. Every 5-10 minutes it'd drop out, kill my stream and I'd have to wait until the NIC stabilised until I could reconnect to the media share.

Prompted me to put together a new PC. Hooray for salary sacrifice.

Ego

Yeah, irritating as all hell. I first ran into it when my college built a bunch of Cel-a's as a project. Onboard everything (SiS video), one AGP/PCI (but right next to each other so you'd get one or the other.) ALL the onboard NICs would do that, every 10-15 mins just dump themselves out with a hardware failure. Totally worthless.

I mean honestly by now a NIC should be pretty easy to figure out. Alas...

Cronus

Ego wrote: »

Yeah, irritating as all hell. I first ran into it when my college built a bunch of Cel-a's as a project. Onboard everything (SiS video), one AGP/PCI (but right next to each other so you'd get one or the other.) ALL the onboard NICs would do that, every 10-15 mins just dump themselves out with a hardware failure. Totally worthless.

I mean honestly by now a NIC should be pretty easy to figure out. Alas...

Yes, but it's probably more of a lowest bidder type thing. Whoever can build this NIC, or entire motherboard, will get the contract. Therefore the cheapest parts and labor are going to be used.

That's my primary problem with big name computers as they seem to fail so much more often and faster than the computers I build myself by buying name brand parts.