TP-Link 2.5GB PCIe Network Card (TX201) – PCIe to 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter, Supports Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, Win Server 2022/2019/2016, Linux

Funciona muy bien, hay que descargar e instalar drivers para que funcione bien.

These 2.5Gb NICs are easy to use. Great compatibility, didn’t need any drivers installed in my systems. Small size means they can fit in almost any system. They come with a low profile bracket. Using your existing Cat5 you can get great value for money with these cards.

Installed it on my Windows 11 PC, very easy. When I plugged in my ethernet cable, still only 980Mbps with an internet speed test. Hmmm, I have Bell Fibre with a H-4000 router, 1.5Gbps service and CAT 6 cable but no prize. According to the TP-Link support site, the 2.5Gbps light should be flashing but it wasn’t. Long story short, was not plugged into the 10Gbps jack (The silvery one, not yellow) on the router. That was the trick. Download speed test was 1.6Gbps, yay! Works like a champ now. Highly recommend and way cheaper than getting a new motherboard, aka newer PC.

I had no issues installing the card itself and getting it to perform as described in the product description, and I do see greater than 1 Gb/sec download speeds on my PC with this card (when connected to the 2.5 Gbe port on my router) when testing with Speedtest. The only thing that I had to deal with (which is why I knocked it down a star) is that, when installed on a Windows 10 PC and using either the generic Windows 10 built-in ethernet driver or the TP-Link sourced driver, I discovered that if I use sleep mode to turn off my PC the LAN port on the card will turn off–meaning, when I subsequently wake up my PC from sleep mode it will fail to automatically reconnect to my router (and thus, to the internet). I narrowed it down to it most likely being an Ethernet driver issue because when I was using the built-in Intel LAN controller on the motherboard my PC had no problem automatically re-establishing a LAN connection to my router when I woke it up from sleep.

Figuring that it was most likely an issue with the ethernet driver I tried an updated driver I downloaded from the TP-Link website–still the same issue, and yes this is even though I went into Windows Device Manager and unchecked the box for “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” (more on that part in a moment). I then tried the Realtek ethernet driver for it (downloaded from Realtek’s website)–I first tried the “Win10 Auto Installation Program (NDIS) – Not Support Power Saving” driver since I was thinking I don’t want power saving because I don’t want my ethernet card to go to sleep and thus turn off; you’d think that with that description on the download page it should work–nope, same behavior. I then figured what have I got to lose, and went ahead and downloaded the “Win10 Auto Installation Program (NDIS)” driver–holy smokes, this one apparently did the trick because now when I wake up my PC from sleep the TP-Link LAN card successfully automatically reconnects to my router and establishes an internet connection once again!

Now back to the part about unchecking the box for “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”–oddly enough, with the correct driver in place I (still) had to actually check the box for this setting in order for the TP-Link card to automatically reconnect to my router after waking up my PC from sleep; if I unchecked it, the unwanted behavior returned even with the correct driver in place. Note–you can still leave the box for “Allow the device to wake the computer” unchecked.

I spent hours trying all kinds of different suggested solutions that were offered up on the internet to fix this issue, and am glad I was finally able to figure it out; without this solution/fix my only options were to either do a manual “disable/enable” of the connection in the Windows 10 network settings or reboot my PC (doing the latter would make it pointless to put my PC in sleep mode to begin with). Hopefully this helps out someone who’s running Windows 10 and utilizes sleep mode to turn off their PC.

This works just as advertised and is super easy to install and gives you the advertised speed – This works fantastic and is at a super price point