I appreciate your help, and I've found that release myself on the Asus forums. I will give it a try, but honestly I dont expect anything to improve
In the meantime since my last post I have broadened my troubleshooting search out of desperation and have fallen into the disaster wonderland pit that is Intel's "Foxville" 2.5Gbps NIC lineup (I225, E3100G, ...). The more I research, the more pessimistic I get
There was an official Intel acknowledgment for the I225 NIC that it had a hardware design fault. Here is the "errata" for that:
www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/...rs-up-to-2-5gbe.html
(Technical description is below the table in the "For official communication on this issue" link)
Supposedly it was fixed properly in I225V2 and I226 NIC hardware.
However, there are mentions of NIC firmware updates, NVM updates, and corresponding drivers for existing users unable to replace their hardware.
So my issue is layered, and I will try to outline it below:
- E3100G is not explicitly mentioned on the Intel I225 errata post, so I don't know if the FW, NVM and driver updates are applicable for me (even though it is considered in the same product "family")
- my understanding is that E3100G is a direct rebrand of RTL8215B(G), as the older Realtek drivers had explicit "support" for Killer E3100G, and the Killer driver .inf has explicit references for E3100G=RTL8125B(G), further increasing my doubt that I225 "fixes" could work for me
- newer Realtek NIC drivers have stopped offering explicit E3100G support in their .inf as outlined by Tom in the posts above, so a forced manual install is the only option with no guarantees that it will work at all
I have also emailed ASRock's customer support to try and get any official recommendations, software fixes, etc., or possibly a board replacement. Again, I am not optimistic that any of it will result in a positive outcome, especially since ASRock did not make a newer ITX board after the B650E chipset to replace/remedy this fault.
P.S. I did not mean to "hijack" this thread with Intel related issues, however this is a pretty distinct/overlapping situation. I appreciate any hints, tips and help from this community
