Intel Gigabit CT PCI-E Network Adapter EXPI9301CTBLK

My Dell Dimension E510 desktop had the PRO/100 VE desktop adapter as its NIC, which worked just fine. I was upgrading my E510 from XP to Windows 7 and wanted a new Ethernet card so I chose the Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter. I had PROSet software installed along with the driver for the PRO/100 VE. Some helpful instructions for those that want to upgrade your driver or install a new Ethernet card; With PROSet, you must first remove your current adapter from the PROSet software BEFORE uninstalling PROSet and the current driver. If you don't you may end up with a phantom adapter that causes problems when you try to install a new version of PROSet and an updated driver. I installed the Gigabit CT card while still running XP. I had a free PCI-Express (x1) slot, which made installing the new card easy. During system startup I entered Setup and disabled the PRO/100 VE NIC and then proceeded with the rest of startup. I then installed a new version of PROSet and a new driver that I downloaded from Intel's web site. I didn't have to reboot after installing the software. The card just worked. When I upgraded from XP to Windows 7, the OS recognized the Gigabit CT card and installed drivers automatically so I didn't have to worry about downloading and installing a driver after installing the OS. The only thing is that Windows 7 didn't install PROSet, which is optional software anyway so it's not required. My house is wired with CAT5 instead of CAT5e or CAT6 so I really don't get the benefit of having a Gigabit network adapter. My VPN router is not a Gigabit router. It's only rated at 75Mbps. With my current Comcast service I'm getting about 25Mbps download and 4Mbps upload, which is about the same as I was getting with the PRO/100 VE NIC so having a Gigabit card isn't making any difference for me. However, the card works flawlessly and I'm very pleased with it. If you're wired with CAT5e or CAT6 and have Gigabit network equipment I would highly recommend the CT Desktop Adapter. It's a great Ethernet card, easy to install, works with Windows 7, and it provides great performance even in a non-Gigabit environment. You can download the latest PROSet and driver from Intel's web site.

I recently read an article that declared that PC hardware has become so mature and commoditized that you'll get the same performance and reliability no matter what you buy; brand names no longer matter; go for the cheapest part that does the job. My experience, however, doesn't bear that out. I built two identical home servers, each with two NICs; one on-board, the other a $10 generic gigabit PCI-E card I picked up as an afterthought from the local computer store. From the start it seemed that the built-in network link was faster, and iftop (a Linux network stats tool) quickly confirmed it: with a 10GB test file, the generic-card link was running 470Mb/sec average, 550Mb peak, whereas the onboard link was running 720Mb / 920Mb. Worse still, after a few days the PCI-E cards' throughput would crash to all of 3-5Mb/sec. The only way to recover was to reboot both servers, only to see it degrade again a few days later. Both onboard and card NICs were using the same driver, so that was out. Swapping network switches and cables made no difference, nor did swapping the cards themselves with the spare I'd bought along with the other two. Running out of options, I played a hunch and picked up a couple of these Intels from Amazon, and swapped them in. BAM! 750Mb/sec average / 1.03Gb/sec peak, and they're still cranking at this pace as I write this, two weeks later. One of these days I'll learn not to skimp on stuff like this. These Intel NICs are almost 3X the price of the generic cards, and worth it and then some in grief avoidance. Five stars.

Intel Gigabit CT PCI-E network adapter When I built two of the same systems back in 2013 along with this card, I never actually used this Cat5e card until 2021. I was lazy and was using Wifi dual band USB adapters and then the built-in mobo 2.4 Wifi, overtime, all started having intermittent connection issues or completely stopped working. I've always planned to connect the desktops via hard wire and finally did in early 2021 using Cat6 flat cable made by "Jadaol", when the final Wifi was on it's last leg. I have a 600 Mbps plan, when using Wifi, in my environment, I typically get an average of 50Mbps with 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz was 260Mbps, when they were working. Once I hard wired the systems with this card, now both systems are getting an average of 700Mbps. Cards working as they should from current my experience, no regrets. It was a plug n play (currently running Windows 10).

I got this card as a 2nd nic in my gaming rig to do teaming but it doesn't work. After much messing around trying to get it to work found out it won't work with Windows 8.1 anyways. Hopefully they will be providing an updated driver to fix this since Windows 7 and Windows 8 does work with Intel teaming with Intel® Advanced Network Services (ANS) as long as you download it from Intel website. Can't do software teaming either because Microsoft only supports teaming via software in Windows 2012. Otherwise, as standalone card it's automatically detected by every OS I tried and should work great for most as long as you don't plan on using it in a team in Windows 8.1 as I already mentioned. Will update everyone if they ever update drivers to fully support latest version of Windows. If you overlook the above problems this card is otherwise great and more powerful than your average non-Intel nic card that probably comes with your motherboard. For example, I was able to easily get an extra 10Mb/s internet speed download from Comcast i.e. 110 to 120 just by increasing the recieve buffer from 256 to 1024 in the advanced options of this card. [...] I downgrade my rating since it's been 2 years and Intel never updated drivers to support teaming even though they said they would in the driver release notes:" Creating Intel ANS teams and VLANs on Windows® 10 is currently not supported. As a result, when created, teams and VLANs do not pass traffic. We expect that ANS will be supported on Windows 10 client in a future release." p.s. Card works fine with teaming as long as you're running Windows 2012. I haven't tested windows 7 and windows 8 since I don't use them anymore on my main machine but they should also work fully since they have full driver support also.

fast shipping to me here in PA. normally I go for newegg but their price was slightly higher. enough about that on to the card. running an HP desktop from walmart, about a year old, fresh upgrade to windows 8 (yeah I know) because 8 basically has a slightly more refined version of win 7 running behind all those stupid tiles everything worked like a charm. card detected and installed automatically without any effort on my part... physical installation to slot was nice, came with a small form factor backing plate. card is a little long so you might have to re-route your wires in the case, my usb header wires were in the way, very easy. my on-board 10/100 interface was slowing down the internet speeds coming from my brand new ea2700 router so after trying to tweak the routers internal settings I figured the problem was hardware. I do get a direct 1 GB connection on a cat 5e cable reported both in windows and in the router status page. downloads now max out where they should be on my 50/10 mbps plan. intel wins again. (don't tell my NIC that its helping an AMD processor deliver me digital entertainment!) buy this card if you are still running a 10/100 card or onboard and you have an internet plan higher than 25mbit, that seems to be the cut line for routers to talk over 10/100 before they limit speeds.

Slide into the slot, power up your PC, done. Works reliably with no issues. Tested separately on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. No driver installation necessary on either OS. Therefore, lack of official continued support from Intel for this strictly speaking outdated device is not an issue at all. I haven't tested Linux just yet, but IIRC recommendations for this Intel device, it's a very common and well-established controller which routinely has a ubiquitous support in Linux as well. Got it to solve my "Oh, apparently, MSI MPG B550 GAMING CARBON WIFI board has a crappy Ethernet controller (LAN), namely Realtek RTL8125B (2.5Gbps), which has a known, documented on forums, and admitted by Realtek IIRC, unsolvable-in-SW hardware bug for 1 Gbps mode that all the so-called review media failed to mention, which results in the board regularly (2 times a day?) dropping the connection when it's running 1 Gbps, 1/3 of the time not restoring at all, 2/3 of the time silently restoring itself to 100 Mbps mode" problem, with the only known workarounds being either rebooting the device or physically unplugging and plugging in back the Ethernet cable. My only dislike is that it's a bit expensive for what it is, but I gather, resellers know why people are after these bad boys (see the above - Realtek RTL8125B is a commonly used 2.5 Gbps controller present in other boards as well, and I have little doubt there are other LAN controllers out there that are just as faulty as well), so they drive the price up, either intentionally or just mechanically based on the supply/demand analytics. Can't really do anything about it...

I felt I needed to install a new subnet to run older Windows OSes. The networking software products I sell run on everything from Windows 95 to Windows 7, so a new release of my software has to be qualified against older, vulnerable OSes. Yes, I do have customers running Windows 98 and 2000. Now that XP will no longer be supported as of April of 2014, I decided to isolate the older OSes from the rest of the network. Because of the nature of the products I sell, I could not simply install a $20 router to NAT the subnet. Linux allows a single NIC to handle multiple IP Addresses, but that left me with an Ethernet collision domain that overlapped IP Subnets. That works, but not without occasional complaints. The Linux CentOS that I run gives me relatively powerful tools to route and firewall a subnet. I went looking for an inexpensive NIC that I could install on a open slot in my server, preferably a PCI Express x1 slot. I strongly preferred a gigabit NIC to speed up network backups. BTW, the test OSes all run as VMware or VirtualBox guests on host PCs that do support gigabit NICs. This NIC fit my needs, so I ordered it from Amazon where I am a Prime member. The NIC arrived a day early. It went into the server with no problems and was working within 30 minutes. I am very pleased with the Amazon service and the Intel NIC's performance. Price is fine. Amazon Prime convenience is wonderful. I have had the NIC installed for less than a day, but I do have a great deal of experience with Intel NICs so I am expecting that the device will work for years. If this NIC does not live up to those expectations, I'll update this review.

I run an unRAID system and purchased one of these because I kept having lock ups/crashes while transferring data. It seemed to only occur when running very large transfers and I got the feeling it had something to do with the Realtek NIC on the motherboard. I picked one of these up and installed it and haven't really had an issue since (there were some hiccups but I think the problem also stemmed from some poorly setup shares). Anyways, if you need a second NIC this is a great choice. However you might want to get the regular PCI version (I'm wishing that I did). The bandwidth on a PCI slot is more than enough to support a Gigabit connection and won't take away from valuable PCIe slots that you might use for things like SAS expander cards and what not. Also, if you're running unRAID, remember that it will only notice one NIC, so if you want to use this you need to disable the onboard NIC in the BIOS.

Nach viel Ärger mit On-Board-LAN war ein Wechsel der NICs von Nöten, und nach ein wenig Suche im WWW bin ich irgendwan bei den CT-Desktop Karten von Intel hängen geblieben. Laut Reviews auf div. Seiten sollten diese problemlos und vergleichsweise schnell arbeiten, was mir bei bisher maximal 12 MiB/s und regelmäßigen Verbindungseinbrüchen mit den Onboard-Lö- sungen mehr als zusagte. Frühere Versuche mit Realtek-basierten Karten waren auch in die Hose gegangen, sei es durch die gleichen Probleme wie mit Onboard-LAN, oder, wie im Fall von 3 bau- gleichen Realtek PCIe-GBit-Karten (in 3 Rechnern) mit dem zeitgleichen Ableben 1 Woche nach Einbau (bei auch max. 12 MiB/s wohlgemerkt). Die Intel-Karten haben derweil die Wochenfrist überlebt und überzeugen mit 50-80 MiB/s je nach Dateigröße und -mischung und bisher 100%iger Stabilität. Es sind keine Einstellungen nötig, die Karten müssen nur eigebaut werden, Treiber von Intel installieren (nicht dabei, muss runtergeladen werden) und fertig. Einziger Nachteil, unter Vista gibt es keine Standarttreiber, d.h. die Karten laufen nicht ohne externen Treiber. Den sollte man also runterladen, bevor man den Onboardkram ausschaltet. Fazit: Die Intel Karten kosten das 2-3fache anderer GBit-Lösungen, belohnen aber mit etwa 5-8fachen Datenrate im Vergleich zu Onboard-LAN (hier 2x Gigabyte mit P35 und X58 Chipsatz, 1x Zotac nVidia ION) bzw. anderen günstigen NICs. Kaufen, Einbauen, Freuen - die Dinger sind es wert.

I used it for a Asrock J4105 mini ITX mobo and works straight out of the box. Speed is better than the Realtek 8111 on board lan and synology updates do not break my NAS

I have a brand new high performance PC with an i7 intel processor, 32 Mb ram, a high performance Gigabyte motherboard, SSD and a high end video and sound card that is running Win 7 x64 which I built. After some issues with my network connection developed I decided to look into the possibility of a separate network port card as I didn't want to have to take my computer apart again to extract the motherboard I did some research and identified that I would be better to purchase a more expensive but higher performance network card that matched the rest of my system. I was hoping it would resolve my networking issues, but I wasn't expecting a performance boost on log on our loading we pages given the performance of the rest of my PC hardware. How wrong I was! Initial log onto network is now almost instantaneous and web pages load perceptibly faster. It didn't resolve the networking issues I was experiencing as this turned out to be a router issue. However, I'm still very pleased I have invested in this network card due to the performance increase it delivers and intel have provided updated drivers/ tools for it that enable you to run both hardware and network cable checks to assist in fault finding etc. If you want to increase the performance of your PC I definitely recommend investing in this quality high performance network card.

Do the job , easy to install

J'ai un PC qui sert de serveur domestique, très sollicité et à partir duquel je partage en direct moult fichiers multimédias, certains allant jusqu'à plusieurs Gigas au niveau de la taille. J'ai commencé par utiliser la prise Ethernet intégrée à la carte mère (un PC Dell XPS), la carte est tombée HS au bout de quelques mois d'utilisation. Puis je suis passé par une carte réseau TPlink sur port PCI, qui a duré jusqu'à aujourd'hui mais dont la fluidité ne m'a pas satisfait. Après avoir lu les commentaires très positifs sur cette carte Intel, j'ai franchi le pas sans trop me faire d'illusions sur la différence que je constaterai. Et bien je confirme tout ce qui a été dit, mes fichiers Full HD de plusieurs gigas sont lus instantanément sur les PC de mon réseau domestique, sans aucune saccade, la navigation dans les dossiers réseaux mappés ne présentent aucun ralentissement, le partage du flux TV via Dvblink est super fluide, bref mon réseau domestique a trouvé enfin La carte, sans me ruiner, mais qui correspond tout à fait à mon besoin, et, cerise sur le gâteau, elle a été reconnue immédiatement par Windows (8.1 Pro) et toute de suite opérationnelle. Bref, je recommande cette carte pour tous ceux qui ont une configuration et un besoin similaire au mien.