Quote Originally Posted by humeyboy View Post
The GIG NIC's will show 100mbit as that's all you need normally.

They will change to 1000mbit if needed or if you take setting OFF Auto and set to 1000mbit

They are 10/100/1000mbit NIC's actually.
I haven't changed any settings, and it shows up as 1Gb. I'm only using 1 NIC (the other is disabled), and I'm hooked into a Gb router.

I've never seen it drop to 100Mb b/c of lack of need and I've never heard of NICs doing that. It's not like speedstep.




Quote Originally Posted by GFORCE100 View Post
The same effect can be triggered by amending the TCP/IP settings of the NIC itself rather than teaming them together. It's worth checking out the NIC settings in device manager and/or the Windows registry. I don't know which settings would need tuning off the top of my head (too taxing on the brain hehe) but things like concurrent connections, read/send buffer and so forth. Changing things like MTU won't help if you're on ADSL since as far as I remember ADSL supports a MTU of 576 bytes. You're always going to get encapsulation/overhead/fragmentation and unless you're using Gigabit or higher (Your PC <> Router/Switch) I wouldn't worry about it overly much (no need to think jumbo frames to increase throughput efficiency etc.).

The only exception to the above would be if you have a hub in play, especially if it's set at 10Mb/s Ethernet which wasn't full duplex hence packet collisions galore (I doubt many people still use them though).

There are apps online that tune your Internet connection for you, or info on what to change in the Windows registry.

You can't get 1000Mb/s Ethernet to work if your router/switch only supports Fast Ethernet which is 100Mb/s. Auto-negotiation won't allow it, even if you set it manually to 1000/1000 it's a no go. Also you ned CAT 5e/6 UTP or better cabling (i.e. STP if you are sending secret info )
That makes more sense. Teaming shouldn't really help if the Internet is still the bottleneck, but if it's a work-around for unoptimized throughput settings then it seems much more feasible.