Intel Releases New Driver To Mitigate I226 & I225 Ethernet Controller Issues
Intel is releasing a new driver to mitigate the connection drop issues faced by customers running boards with I226 & I225 ethernet controllers.
Back in January, it was reported that the Intel I226-V Ethernet controller was affected by the same bug that was found within the older I225-V chip. What happened was that the controller randomly dropped the connection and sometimes didn't even make the Ethernet port run on certain PCs. It was an issue most prevalent on the Intel 700-series motherboards which were launched along with the Intel 13th Gen desktop CPU family.
Intel has reproduced the issue and is diligently working on a root cause and fix. For any of our customers experiencing this problem, a mitigation option to explore is to disable the “Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE)” mode in the Advanced Windows/ Linux driver setting. We believe this should help. We are continuing to assess the situation and will follow-up accordingly.
Intel released a small workaround to mitigate the problem last month and it looks like the same mitigations have now been implemented on the driver level within the new driver package for the 700-series motherboards. As published by MSI's HQ Technical Marketing over in the MSI Gaming subreddit, we can see that the new driver is now available on the product pages of various boards (the following is from the product support page of the MSI MEG Z790 ACE motherboard):
I did a quick check with the new drivers and it seems like the issue has been resolved for now as before, I had to restart the PC to make it work correctly but that wasn't the case with the newest drivers. With that said, it should be noted that mitigation doesn't necessarily mean a proper fix and if the problem is really on the hardware side, then a new revision of the chip must be issued to fully address the problem. Hardware leaker, chi11eddog, reports that Intel is still doing an investigation on the issue and plans to provide a robust solution soon:
Motherboard makers should be updating their product pages with the same driver for the I226 and I225 Ethernet controllers. MSI is definitely the first to offer them so others should follow suit too.
