Faulty network card in HP Omen x 900-290nd?

[LoekvanKooten]

HI all,

As you probably know, this is HP's flagship system, for a flagship price. That's okay. I pay for quality.

However, it now turns out that my network card (the built-in Realtek GBE Gaming Ethernet Family Controller) has been faulty from the start. In standard mode, it drops every x minutes and even completely disappears from the device list in Windows. Then a few seconds later it comes back at full speed  (1 Gigabit - tested at speedtest.net) again.

The only way to prevent this, and I've excluded every other cause by changing routers and cables (while no other desktop in the very same network shows the same symptoms - I've checked this using the same cables and routers I was using for the HP Omen), is by putting the card in Half Duplex 10 Mbps mode. Which is a bit of a shame for a Gigabit card.

In hindsight, it turns out it has always been this way. I've tried every single driver from the HP support page, but there's no difference. If I try the newest driver from Realtek itself, the card resets every second, so I had to revert that immediately.

I'm not planning to send the system back for repair: I can't miss it, it's way too heavy and repair will take way too long, and I doubt it will even solve the issue. But maybe I have missed something really important.

As for now, I've ordered an extra Intel Gigabit card to fill that very last PCIex16 slot on the motherboard.

[LoekvanKooten]

P.S. I know there was a similar issue with the pre-installed Omen Command Center software on the computer, but this is not the cause. I've deinstalled that and there was no difference.

[LoekvanKooten · Accepted solution]

Bought a 25 euro network card from Intel. Installed it in the one and only remaining slot. No issues or whatsoever: very stable 1 Gigabit connection running. So it's clealry the NIC on the motherboard that was fried from the beginning. Anyway, issue solved.