Man... I know the feeling about wasting time on computer shit... I was about to go into such a time sink last night when my business manager's Win10 computer all of a sudden couldn't connect to the file server. I just told her "we could spend hours tonight trying to fix this, get frustrated, stay late and be tired... or, we can call it a day, go home, enjoy time with our families and be happy knowing the world won't end when computers stop working." She made a wise choice.What. A. Day. I put my new Chelsio in. Windows does DOES not find a driver for it, so you have to use the Unified installer v1.5.13.0 from service.chelsio.com. As soon as I loaded the driver, BAM. Windows 10 BSOD's. Reboot, repeat.
So, I figured I'd format real quickly and load chipset, basic drivers and updates and see if I could get it to load. After multiple clean installs and installation order (chipset, driver, update: driver, update, chipset: etc) without success, I finally tried port 2 on the card, and what do you know, all my issues vanished. Really?? Hours wasted on what might be a bad port?
Anyway, I went ahead and finished my workstation setup without another BSOD, and once all setup I bench marked with the same 40GB file. Pretty much the same results.
So, doesn't seem like there is any advantage to it on a windows machines, at least in my case. Of course the downside is no native driver and more power usage.
On odd thing: windows shows it's link speed at 10.7 Gbps. Not 10, 10.7.
Oh, I did update the firmware to v7.11.0 too.
So, can you repeat the BSOD if you use the suspected bad port? Were you using SFP+ optical modules or copper/DAC? If SFP+, I wonder if the transceiver is bad?