Download Speed Troubleshooting

[AndyOz]

Hello Everyone,

 

Getting a weird problem trying to get my full internet plan download speed at my computer. Here's the situation:

 

Comp 1 (my computer) is connected with a 20ft cat5 cable to a TP-Link TL-SG105 which is then connected with a 50ft cat6 cable back to the modem.

Comp 2 (wife's computer) is connected with a similar 20ft cat5 cable to the same switch.

The internet plan speed is 600Mbps down and 10Mbps up.

Comp 1 can download games from Steam at a max of 50-60Mbps (connected to closest US server), and gets ~360Mbps from speedtest.net.

Comp 2 can download games from Steam at 540Mbps (connected to same server), and gets ~550Mbps from speedtest.net.

Comp 1 has an i7-8700k installed on a Gigabyte Z370N Wifi motherboard with two 1Gbps network ports on the rear I/O.

Comp 2 has a Ryzen 5 3600 installed on a ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4 with 1 1Gbps network port on the rear I/O.

 

Here's what I've tried so far to fix the speed issues on comp 1:

* connecting the current cable to the other port, no change

* connecting extra cat5 cable to comp 1 and switch, no change

* connecting comp 2's cat5 cable to both ports on comp 1, no change

* connecting directly to the modem, small improvement (speedtest.net results went up to 390Mbps, I'm assuming this increase was from removing the overhead of the switch)

* tested built-in wifi with the motherboard's included antenna, worse results (expected but worth testing still just in case there was a significant improvement and I could download on wifi and then play the games on ethernet)

* updated bios, chipset drivers, and LAN drivers from the motherboard support page, no change

* contacted my ISP, they said there was a decent amount of packet loss between the ISP and my modem, but that doesn't easily explain why comp 2 is able to get access to the full download speeds and comp 1 can't.

 

Is there something I'm missing here? Or is the MB and/or CPU just taking a crap and it's time to replace them? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[FloRolf]

Can you confirm that all values are actually megabit/s and not some in megabyte/s? 

That's a very common misconception and I want to get that out of the way first. 

[TylerD321]

25 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

Can you confirm that all values are actually megabit/s and not some in megabyte/s? 

That's a very common misconception and I want to get that out of the way first. 

Steam by default is in MB and speedtest is in Mb. You pay for internet in Mb. Is it possible that you changed the default values on one of the PC's and forgot to do it on the other and this is where confusion arises?

[AndyOz]

47 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

Can you confirm that all values are actually megabit/s and not some in megabyte/s? 

That's a very common misconception and I want to get that out of the way first. 

I had my steam client set to show the downloads in megabit/s on purpose for this reason. I probably should've included that in the original post. Unfortunately that 50-60Mbps that I'm getting from the steam client really is bits and not bytes.

[problemsolver]

2 hours ago, AndyOz said:

Hello Everyone,

 

Getting a weird problem trying to get my full internet plan download speed at my computer. Here's the situation:

 

Comp 1 (my computer) is connected with a 20ft cat5 cable to a TP-Link TL-SG105 which is then connected with a 50ft cat6 cable back to the modem.

Comp 2 (wife's computer) is connected with a similar 20ft cat5 cable to the same switch.

The internet plan speed is 600Mbps down and 10Mbps up.

Comp 1 can download games from Steam at a max of 50-60Mbps (connected to closest US server), and gets ~360Mbps from speedtest.net.

Comp 2 can download games from Steam at 540Mbps (connected to same server), and gets ~550Mbps from speedtest.net.

Comp 1 has an i7-8700k installed on a Gigabyte Z370N Wifi motherboard with two 1Gbps network ports on the rear I/O.

Comp 2 has a Ryzen 5 3600 installed on a ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4 with 1 1Gbps network port on the rear I/O.

 

Here's what I've tried so far to fix the speed issues on comp 1:

* connecting the current cable to the other port, no change

* connecting extra cat5 cable to comp 1 and switch, no change

* connecting comp 2's cat5 cable to both ports on comp 1, no change

* connecting directly to the modem, small improvement (speedtest.net results went up to 390Mbps, I'm assuming this increase was from removing the overhead of the switch)

* tested built-in wifi with the motherboard's included antenna, worse results (expected but worth testing still just in case there was a significant improvement and I could download on wifi and then play the games on ethernet)

* updated bios, chipset drivers, and LAN drivers from the motherboard support page, no change

* contacted my ISP, they said there was a decent amount of packet loss between the ISP and my modem, but that doesn't easily explain why comp 2 is able to get access to the full download speeds and comp 1 can't.

 

Is there something I'm missing here? Or is the MB and/or CPU just taking a crap and it's time to replace them? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Great info/troubleshooting so far!

• Can you post a screen shot of a complete test on each computer from this website?
  • Just would like to see a more detailed, better measurement than speedtest.net
• You didn't mention what OS you're using. Assuming it's Windows 11, start with resetting the windows networking stack, You can search for "Network reset" and it will appear in the start menu

 

 

[AndyOz]

10 hours ago, problemsolver said:

Great info/troubleshooting so far!

• Can you post a screen shot of a complete test on each computer from this website?
  • Just would like to see a more detailed, better measurement than speedtest.net
• You didn't mention what OS you're using. Assuming it's Windows 11, start with resetting the windows networking stack, You can search for "Network reset" and it will appear in the start menu

 

 

Ah shoot I did forget that detail didn't I. I'm running Windows 10, but I found the network reset still and did that before running the tests. Attached are the test results. Both tests were performed on a fresh restart of the computers, and no other programs or tabs in chrome were running when the test was going. (edited to remove what you suggested)

Comp 1 test results:

Comp 2 test results:

[AndyOz]

Sorry more details missed there. Both computers are running Windows 10 with all the latest updates installed. I wasn't sure how these attached images were going to come across so I didn't get to label them but the top image is comp 1 and the bottom is comp 2. I ran the test 3 times on comp 1 just because of how shockingly slow the download was but got the same results each time.

[problemsolver]

Oh shoot, should've mentioned to black out your IP, ISP and map. Might want to edit your post to do that. If you just copied and pasted the pics, download them, edit them and re-upload them and delete the old ones.

 

This is an interesting issue.

• Does Event Viewer show any issues?
• Does booting into Safe Mode with Networking have the same results?
• When doing speed tests, does Task Manager report the same Tx (Transmit)/Rx (Receive) speeds? Or does Task Manager show another program is consuming bandwidth. (I highly doubt it, but always need to check.)
• What brand of network adapter is it?
  • If it's Intel (though I'm guessing it's Realtek not Intel ) do the following:
  1. Windows Key + R
  2. Type ncpa.cpl and press enter
  3. Right-click on your network adapter and click Properties
  4. Click the Configure tab
  5. Click the Advanced tab
  6. Change Energy Efficient Ethernet to Off

[AndyOz]

10 hours ago, problemsolver said:

Oh shoot, should've mentioned to black out your IP, ISP and map. Might want to edit your post to do that. If you just copied and pasted the pics. Download them, edit them and re-upload them and delete the old ones.

 

This is an interesting issue.

• Does Event Viewer show any issues?
• Does booting into Safe Mode with Networking have the same results?
• When doing speed tests, does Task Manager report the same Tx (Transmit)/Rx (Receive) speeds? Or does Task Manager show another program is consuming bandwidth. (I highly doubt it, but always need to check.)
• What brand of network adapter is it?
  • If it's Intel (though I'm guessing it's Realtek not Intel ) do the following:
  1. Windows Key + R
  2. Type ncpa.cpl and press enter
  3. Right-click on your network adapter and click Properties
  4. Click the Configure tab
  5. Click the Advanced tab
  6. Change Energy Efficient Ethernet to Off

Ya I was thinking I should remove those, but networking isn't my strong suit so I didn't know for sure what was important to the test and what wasn't.

• I've never used Event Viewer before so I'm not certain how to read through the data in but I do have ~100 errors and ~200 warnings in the last 24hrs regarding Device Setup Manager. Other than that everything seems to be operating normally. 
• Booting into safe mode with networking shows no change.
• Task Manager reports the same transmit and receive speeds as both speedtest.net and Cloudflare. Also went ahead and checked CPU and drive usage for during Steam game downloads, CPU hit a max of 17% usage spread mostly evenly over all threads and the M.2 SSD had 1% max.
• It is an intel network adapter. shows up as Intel(R) Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V in the network connections page. The energy efficient ethernet was turned on. I have turned that off and ran another Cloudflare speed test. No change to the results.

[problemsolver]

1 hour ago, AndyOz said:

Ya I was thinking I should remove those, but networking isn't my strong suit so I didn't know for sure what was important to the test and what wasn't.

• I've never used Event Viewer before so I'm not certain how to read through the data in but I do have ~100 errors and ~200 warnings in the last 24hrs regarding Device Setup Manager. Other than that everything seems to be operating normally. 
• Booting into safe mode with networking shows no change.
• Task Manager reports the same transmit and receive speeds as both speedtest.net and Cloudflare. Also went ahead and checked CPU and drive usage for during Steam game downloads, CPU hit a max of 17% usage spread mostly evenly over all threads and the M.2 SSD had 1% max.
• It is an intel network adapter. shows up as Intel(R) Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V in the network connections page. The energy efficient ethernet was turned on. I have turned that off and ran another Cloudflare speed test. No change to the results.

That was very useful!

 

Try following the steps Intel outlines here: Intel® Ethernet Connection I219-V Connection Issue
What they don't outline is how to actually install the driver.

1. Download the zip file.
2. Extract the zip to a folder. (It will take a while because it's all the Intel NIC drivers)
3. Uninstall the current driver from Device Manager.
4. Then click the add drivers button (gear with upward pointing green arrow)
5. Point it to the folder that you extracted from the zip

If that doesn't fix it, you can post some of the device errors from Event Viewer as that might be helpful.

 

Also, just to double-check, do the following to ensure the link is negotiating properly.

1. Windows Key + R
2. Type ncpa.cpl and press enter
3. Right-click on your network adapter and click Status
4. Does it show a 1 Gbps link has been negotiated?

[AndyOz]

6 hours ago, problemsolver said:

That was very useful!

 

Try following the steps Intel outlines here: Intel® Ethernet Connection I219-V Connection Issue
What they don't outline is how to actually install the driver.

1. Download the zip file.
2. Extract the zip to a folder. (It will take a while because it's all the Intel NIC drivers)
3. Uninstall the current driver from Device Manager.
4. Then click the add drivers button (gear with upward pointing green arrow)
5. Point it to the folder that you extracted from the zip

If that doesn't fix it, you can post some of the device errors from Event Viewer as that might be helpful.

 

Also, just to double-check, do the following to ensure the link is negotiating properly.

1. Windows Key + R
2. Type ncpa.cpl and press enter
3. Right-click on your network adapter and click Status
4. Does it show a 1 Gbps link has been negotiated?

I followed the steps you provided and got that driver reinstalled (version 12.19.2.55), no change.

I also double checked the link and it shows it is properly negotiated as a 1Gbps link.

 

Here's the large quantity error event IDs:

• event ID: 10005, QTY in 24hrs: 137, description: "DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service TokenBroker with arguments "Unavailable" in order to run the server: (server name)" where (server name) changes for each event.
• event ID: 131, QTY in 24hrs: 156, description: "Metadata staging failed, result=0x80070490 for container (container name)" where (container name) changes for each event.

Here's the large quantity warning event IDs as well just in case:

• event ID: 200, QTY in 24hrs: 167, description: "A connection to the Windows Update service could not be established."
• event ID: 201, QTY in 24hrs: 129, description: "A connection to the Windows Metadata and Internet Services (WMIS) could not be established."
• event ID: 202, QTY in 24hrs: 270, description: "The Network List Manager reports no connectivity to the internet."

Let me know if you need anything more from the event viewer. I'm not really certain what I should be looking for entirely.

[problemsolver]

35 minutes ago, AndyOz said:

I followed the steps you provided and got that driver reinstalled (version 12.19.2.55), no change.

I also double checked the link and it shows it is properly negotiated as a 1Gbps link.

 

Here's the large quantity error event IDs:

• event ID: 10005, QTY in 24hrs: 137, description: "DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service TokenBroker with arguments "Unavailable" in order to run the server: (server name)" where (server name) changes for each event.
• event ID: 131, QTY in 24hrs: 156, description: "Metadata staging failed, result=0x80070490 for container (container name)" where (container name) changes for each event.

Here's the large quantity warning event IDs as well just in case:

• event ID: 200, QTY in 24hrs: 167, description: "A connection to the Windows Update service could not be established."
• event ID: 201, QTY in 24hrs: 129, description: "A connection to the Windows Metadata and Internet Services (WMIS) could not be established."
• event ID: 202, QTY in 24hrs: 270, description: "The Network List Manager reports no connectivity to the internet."

Let me know if you need anything more from the event viewer. I'm not really certain what I should be looking for entirely.

Not sure that really helped, but have you tried a Windows 10 repair yet?

Make sure you're connected to the internet (may want to use the Wi-Fi adapter since it's faster. Search for Command Prompt in the start menu, then click Run as administrator. (You can right-click Command Prompt also Run as administrator.)

Then run this command:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /Restorehealth

 

• Other than that, to me, it sounds like the NIC is flaky/defective or the PCIE lane for the NIC is having issues. (definitely not worth replacing the entire computer).
• To verify, you could install a Linux Distro to a USB, boot that, and see if you get similar speed tests. That would be relatively easy to do if you wanted and would be a quick way to rule out stuff. If it works fine, than it's likely a defective low-power state that the Windows driver is allowing, or a corrupted Windows install. Both are fixable.
• If it really is the NIC, & assuming the MOBO is out of warranty, get something like this. (Be careful because some of them will only be able to transfer 480 Mbps due to USB limitations. Looks like the one I linked is good to the full 1Gbps though.)

[AndyOz]

2 hours ago, problemsolver said:

Not sure that really helped, but have you tried a Windows 10 repair yet?

Make sure you're connected to the internet (may want to use the Wi-Fi adapter since it's faster. Search for Command Prompt in the start menu, then click Run as administrator. (You can right-click Command Prompt also Run as administrator.)

Then run this command:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /Restorehealth

 

• Other than that, to me, it sounds like the NIC is flaky/defective or the PCIE lane for the NIC is having issues. (definitely not worth replacing the entire computer).
• To verify, you could install a Linux Distro to a USB, boot that, and see if you get similar speed tests. That would be relatively easy to do if you wanted and would be a quick way to rule out stuff. If it works fine, than it's likely a defective low-power state that the Windows driver is allowing, or a corrupted Windows install. Both are fixable.
• If it really is the NIC, & assuming the MOBO is out of warranty, get something like this. (Be careful because some of them will only be able to transfer 480 Mbps due to USB limitations. Looks like the one I linked is good to the full 1Gbps though.)

I ran that repair and it didn't make a difference. HOWEVER, booting into Mint from a USB did fix it! I ran tests on Cloudflare and speedtest.net and got full speeds (590Mbps) like comp 2.

Now the only question I have left, is there an easy way to check for the defective low-power state? Or would it just be simpler to do a clean install of Windows?

[problemsolver]

1 hour ago, AndyOz said:

I ran that repair and it didn't make a difference. HOWEVER, booting into Mint from a USB did fix it! I ran tests on Cloudflare and speedtest.net and got full speeds (590Mbps) like comp 2.

Now the only question I have left, is there an easy way to check for the defective low-power state? Or would it just be simpler to do a clean install of Windows?

Follow my previous post here but instead of going to the Advanced tab, go to the Power Management tab and turn all of that off.

 

You can also try this from here:

• Hit WIN+X, choosing "Windows PowerShell (Admin)" or "Terminal (Admin)"

Paste:

Disable-NetAdapterChecksumOffload -InterfaceDescription "*Intel*" -IncludeHidden -TcpIPv6 -UdpIPv6

 into the PowerShell window, and hit Enter

[AndyOz]

19 hours ago, problemsolver said:

Follow my previous post here but instead of going to the Advanced tab, go to the Power Management tab and turn all of that off.

 

You can also try this from here:

• Hit WIN+X, choosing "Windows PowerShell (Admin)" or "Terminal (Admin)"

Paste:

Disable-NetAdapterChecksumOffload -InterfaceDescription "*Intel*" -IncludeHidden -TcpIPv6 -UdpIPv6

 into the PowerShell window, and hit Enter

I tried both of those but no change still. It's looking like a corrupted Windows install. I'm going to go ahead and and do a complete clean install to make sure it's all correct. Thank you for all your help I really appreciate it!

[problemsolver]

14 minutes ago, AndyOz said:

I tried both of those but no change still. It's looking like a corrupted Windows install. I'm going to go ahead and and do a complete clean install to make sure it's all correct. Thank you for all your help I really appreciate it!

Let us know how that goes!