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Hi gerbils!

I have a mysterious case of the failing marvell yukon ethernet port on my asus p35 mobo...

Was working flawlessly for YEARS! Now I've only just realise that for the last 2 weeks I've been running on my WLAN rather than my LAN as my Asus mobo has both a Marvell controller for ethernet and a realtek card for wireless which I often use both (apartment does not have ethernet cabling in the ceiling yet, so I run the cable from one room to another). Anyway... was annoying me that I was sometimes only get < 4 Mbps on my ADSL2+ line (that used to get >16 Mbps or 1.5mb/s, but was now only getting 300-400kb/s...

I stuffed around plugging laptops into my router, resetting the router, using my mobile, disabling the wifi on my asus mobo, switching to an older router, chatting to my ISP etc.

But it seems to be the Marvell Yukon controller is dead.. now windows device manager says everything is A OK, and when the cat5e is plugged in all the right lights come on. I've downloaded the latest drivers and that didn't even bring it back to life. Sometimes I swear it even works, but not when I'm in the mood to confirm it. Anywho... basically is there anyway that I haven't already tried to prove this is the problem beyond getting another mobo or buying a intel NIC add-on card? (should I have done this ages ago anyway?).

Seriously I can resolve my router at 192.168.0.1 and check internet etc. but pinging my router results in 50% packet loss which is ridiculous! So... I know the ethernet works... it just won't get an internet connection and the wireless NIC is faster, more reliable etc. etc. when it was always the other way around and this is infuriatingly slow that videos can't be watched live anymore and justin.tv is useless to me for the last 2 weeks with the connection in its present state.

Any help is very much appreciated.

P.S. Yes I've tried changing the cat cable over for no change in performance. Is it possible this is deterioration at the router/modem combo end? Instead of mobo ethernet port end?

EDIT: updated WAN to WLAN... and mentioned trying different cat5e cable.

Not to be excessively obvious, but you have tried replacing the ethernet cable, right? Having things work but with high packet loss suggests something like that (often the connectors start to fail intermittently)

But these things do die sometimes. I had an old Slot A motherboard with a discrete on-board NIC and it gave up the ghost one day while the rest of the system continued without a hitch. If you can't solve the problem any other way, an add-in NIC would be the easiest way to stop tearing your hair out.

(BTW, your "WAN" remark momentarily confused me. WAN is "Wide Area Network" -- the stuff beyond your ADSL phone jack, upstream from your LAN. Wireless local stuff is typically abbreviated as WLAN)

I had the same thing happen on my nforce 2 board, NIC worked flawlessly for years. Then I noticed bad lag all the time, thought it was my broadband being laggy but had massive amounts of timeouts and dropped packets. Banged in a PCI NIC, all was well again.