Potential cause of Internet drops and CTD on Series 7 MB's

So after a couple of Windows updates I have had multiple CTD's across 2 sim platforms.  Event Viewer didn't show much other than dropped Internet Connections.. Weird as I have 1.5 Gig connection with no latency, jitter or drops.   Lots of Event Errors I had never seen before.  

Then while searching last night I came across this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raptor-lake-motherboard-ethernet-flaw

Sure enough I am on a series 7 Motherboard on the 2.5Gb port.  I searched this morning and had a bunch of 27 and 32 Event errors.

This may also explain why I keep "dropping" my MSFS Server connections despite Internet being up in the house... I've blamed MS but it may truly be on my end. 

 Yesterday P3D did a full CTD which led me to find this article after the only thing in Event Viewer referenced a dropped connection.

I'm going to try my other Network controller today and may even get a new NIC for the PC... Not a huge fan of wireless on my sim machines.  I sell wireless for a living ironically.  We always tell people to hard wire critical devices that don't move though which includes Sim Rigs 🙂  

For those who don't want to read the article:

Quote

According to a report from TechPowerUp(opens in new tab), Intel's latest I226-V 2.5GbE Ethernet controller, which debuted on 700-series motherboards, may have a design flaw. User reports from the Intel(opens in new tab), Microsoft(opens in new tab), Asus(opens in new tab), and Reddit(opens in new tab) communities allege that the I226-V controller causes frequent connection drops at random times, suggesting a potential design flaw.

 

The I226-V controller, codenamed Foxville, is the successor to the I225-V controller launched in 2019. Unfortunately, the I225-V wasn't perfect and was plagued by many network connection problems that led to connectivity loss and performance deterioration. Since the issues could only be fixed at the hardware level, Intel eventually released the I225-V2 controller. Sadly, motherboards manufactured before the new revision continue to suffer from the issues, leading to workarounds such as gimping the controller to 1GbE mode instead of 2.5GbE.

 

Many Intel 700-series motherboards for 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors leverage the I226-V Ethernet controller. Luckily, the connection drops are brief; you probably wouldn't perceive them in daily usage. However, you'd notice the drops in other workloads, such as downloading a big file, online gaming, or in a video call via Zoom. It's easy to see whether connection drops are occurring on your system if you look inside Windows Event Viewer under the "Windows Logs" section and, subsequently, "System." In addition, TechPowerUp recommends searching for "e2fnexpress" and scouring for Event 27 or Event 32 errors.

 

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