Need help determining if an Intel X550-T2 is real of fake. speed issues

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solomonshv

New Member
May 18, 2018
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hello.

i picked up an Intel X550-T2 on newegg and i'm having some problems with it. it starts out at about 1.1GB/s but then suddenly plummets to as low as 30MB/s stays there for a little while, then goes to 800MB/s+ again. im outside the return period.

the card was made in 2017 and doesn't have a yottamark sticker, but my understanding is that intel stop using it at some point. i could be wrong though. i couldn't attach pictures to this post because they were too big, so i uploaded them to google drive.

X550-T2 - Google Drive

i know it seems crazy that a place like newegg would have fake intel NICs, but they were selling fake Intel CPUs at one point. so nothing will surprise me. any theories? thanks
 

rysti32

New Member
Apr 14, 2018
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What kind of network traffic are you using to benchmark? I doubt that it's a fake. Probably your issue is that you're hitting a bottleneck elsewhere in the system.
 
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dandanio

Active Member
Oct 10, 2017
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Card def. looks legit. Try using iperf3 multi stream without a switch. Remember to adjust transmit/receive windows.
 
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solomonshv

New Member
May 18, 2018
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What kind of network traffic are you using to benchmark? I doubt that it's a fake. Probably your issue is that you're hitting a bottleneck elsewhere in the system.
Card def. looks legit. Try using iperf3 multi stream without a switch. Remember to adjust transmit/receive windows.
i was moving 100+ GB encrypted drive images, which is why i got this card in the first place.

i was actually testing this card by plugging two computers directly into each other without a switch. so, turns out that the NIC is fine, but one of my brand new Samsung 970 PRO SSDs was a lemon. it was overheating and throttling down to a crawl.

i now have this card in a QNAP TVS‑873, which is outfitted with 10TB Gold drives in RAID 6 and 2TB samsung M.2 cache drives. i'm getting a sustained 1.1GB/s going from the NAS and 800MB/s going to the NAS. and this is through a 75 foot CAT 7 cable i picked up on amazon for $20! all looks good.

i honestly never imagined i'd buy a pair of SSDs for over a grand and have it be defective like this. sorry about that. should have tested further before spamming.
 
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rune-san

Member
Feb 7, 2014
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The 970 PRO More than likely is *not* defective. This is nearly every M.2 Drive. M.2's form factor is extremely poor for sustained workload, and almost any modern M.2 SSD will need to throttle shortly after a sustained workload is started. Cooling on most M.2 SSDs is little more than a Copper Tape Sticker, and it doesn't help that most M.2 cards are mounted directly on the motherboard, where other host components cook around it, and where there's little directed, forced airflow.

Using U.2 (SFF-8639) and M.2 to U.2 adapters so that you leverage SSDs that have their aluminum case as a large heatsink gets around this issue, and almost none of them throttle.