Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

Clashed a spare PC together last night from some old bits, was working fine, now the network connection keeps saying it's unplugged then it connects then it's unplugged Ad Infinitum, didn't change anything just booted it up this morning!

XP SP2, Soltek SL-75DRV2 mobo, Nvidia Ti500, 2.2Ghz Athlon, 256mb RAM, 10/100 NIC from Scan (Philex branded RTL8139 chip) which worked fine in my old mobo and another PC my brother uses has the exact same card connected to the same router as me without a problem.

Event View log is full of messages saying Nearly 2 entries per minute!

Tried new Realtek drivers - Same problem
Tried resetting TCP/IP with 'netsh int ip reset c:\log.txt' - Same problem
Tried NIC in 3 different PCI slots - Same problem
Tried different NIC cable - Same problem
Tried uninstalling drivers and rebooting - Same Problem
Tried new f/w in router (Linksys BEFSX41) - Same Problem
Tried a 10mb RTL8029(AS) NIC - IT WORKED!!
Tried the RTL8139 NIC in another compter as I thought it must be faulty - IT WORKED!!

So now I have a NIC card that works in my spare PC but why did the RTL8139 NIC decide to act the country mile in this PC yet it works fine in another PC?

Re: Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

Could be voltage fluctuation on the PCI bus which the nic took exception to?

Do any capacitors on the motherboard look like they have bulges on the top? what brand of PSU are you using and what capacity is it?

Re: Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

PSU is a PC Power and Cooling 750W. It's a 24pin connector but plugs into the old 20pin socket no problem, the extra 4 pins just hang over the end, powers up everything and no lockups or crashes so far. Caps look OK on the board, no electrolyte leaking and no bulges!

I'm using this Soltek board as temp PC, had to RMA my other board (Asus Crosshair) due to a bad BIOS flash, couldn't recover even though it has a 'Crash Free Bios'!!

Re: Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

I have a dell machine that doesn't like PCI addon controllers. (an old optiplex gx1)

My sata card works in PCI slot 1 and Only PCI slot 1 and even then I don't think it initializes it fully since i think it should have a bios and I never see one but linux don't seem to care (boot it off an IDE drive)


I think its just some combinations of hardware don't like each other, Right pain the backside when it happens but the only explaination I can offer

Re: Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

Yes, it has to be a NIC card and motherboard incompatibility but what the cause is I'll probably never know! Could be as Lord Nikon says and it's a voltage issue? Since installing this 10mbit NIC though it's worked flawlessly for the 6 hours the PC's been on and not one 'unplugged' condition has happened!

A PC users life would be really boring if everything worked first time now, wouldn't it?

Re: Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

Oh absolutely.

Could be a voltage fluctuation, but could be that one of the chips on the NIC doesn't like one of the chips on the motherboard. Both possible.

Re: Rtl8139 Nic Bad! Rtl8029 Nic Good!
 

Well, I won't be using that NIC again for a long while as the RMA'd board when it comes back has twin Gigabit Ethernet ports and this old 10bT NIC is running like a little trooper since it was installed :)