I recently bought a Beelink EQR6 (6600h version) for my dad, to replace his aging 5th gen intel desktop PC which can’t run Windows 11. The EQR6 should be more than sufficient for his modest needs (web browsing, administration, light photo and video editing). It has GbE and all the connectivity he needs, so I thought it would be ideal.

The thing is, most of his data is on a Synology NAS that he accesses over gigabit ethernet. This is essential for his use.

Today, as we were setting things up for him, we noticed things were rather sluggish over the network. So I did some speed tests, copying a large file back and forth, and the transfer speed seemed to be capped at 25-30 MByte/s. So that works out to 200-250Mbit/s instead of the expected 1000Mbit/s. That’s only about ⅕ to ¼ of the bandwitdh! Doing the same copy on his old PC using the exact same ethernet cable resulted in 120MByte/s speeds, maxing out the gigabit ethernet as expected.

Troubleshooting steps I already took:

Checked with both NICs, they both have the problem
Verified in the ethernet settings that the link speed was indeed set to 1000/1000 Mbps (it was)
Downloaded and installed the latest Realtek driver (10.74) from here: https://www.realtek.com/Download/List?cate_id=584
Played around with various driver settings through device manager, turning off anything “green” or “powersaving”, none of it seemed to have any effect on the transfer speed.

So I’m quickly running out of ideas here. To rule out cabling issues completely, tomorrow I will take my own mini PC there that I know works at full GbE speeds in my home and see if it has any issues there. I will do some tests with iperf3, will also take a short ethernet cable to test direct PC-to-PC connectivity, and perhaps I’ll put some Linux distro on a USB stick to rule out if it’s a hardware or OS/driver issue.

If anyone has other ideas, would love to hear them.

Would also like to know if anyone else with an EQR6 (or another mini PC with Realtek GbE) has experienced this, or if they are able to reach full GbE speeds on their LAN.