Network Woe's - Why is mine so bad at times?

I have a Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller in my system yet I seem to have problems, large ones at times. My downloads on good days have seen the 100's and on bad days 5K or less. Some of this is the program I use some of it appears to be network releated. This leads me to the following questions.

1) What is your opinoin for ONBOARD VS PCI nic?

2) What is your opinion of the "BLUE" cable that comes with your comcast box?

3) Anyone know of any good tools to trouble shoot to track my network problems down? Ping times "appear" to be good.

Thanks

ShadowDragon

Just as an FYI I tried going to Marvel Yukon web page and there list of drivers, well its rather intersting to say the least, is fun to figure out. I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 Motherboard so going to see if there are updated drivers there as well.

Any other thoughts/suggestions or answers to my previous questions?

Thanks

Well what are you trying to download and from where? May not be you at all, it may be them. There upload speed may stink or traffic is heavy on them. Onboard lan should be just fine and get the same speeds now days.

I have 2 gigabit nic cards built into my board and both work very well.
Although they are realtek i have used yukon with the same success.
Onboard is fine as far as I can see

Shadow, you have to realize that the performance you see online is really dependent on your ISP, traffic on the website you are connecting to, and the bandwidth and server capacity available to the site.

In other words, NO!, your hardware is almost certainly not at fault. If you want to check out the overall performance of your network and your ISP, broadbandreports.com has lots of useful tools and tutorials. Many of the tools are free, but some require a paid membership.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by slgrieb

Shadow, you have to realize that the performance you see online is really dependent on your ISP, traffic on the website you are connecting to, and the bandwidth and server capacity available to the site.

In other words, NO!, your hardware is almost certainly not at fault. If you want to check out the overall performance of your network and your ISP, broadbandreports.com has lots of useful tools and tutorials. Many of the tools are free, but some require a paid membership.

---

slgrieb,

Thanks for the link I'll try it.

All,

As far as where and when it's random sites, random times, and random locations. A site that works fine one minute the next will time out or lag soon as I click a link. Then it may or may not reload on the first try. I also noticed that after ar reboot things got ALOT better. netstat at the command prompt has alot of SYN_WAIT commands in it. I just wonder if something isnt' closing in my web browser right.

Thanks all. If you have any more thoughts or suggestions I'm all ears.

Try http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and click on the site nearest you.