Broken Nic Fixed! Read This!

I'm not sure why Angry hasnt posted this here, but the problem with the onboard lan on LPB and UI boards has been found.

Apparently the MAC address for the controller was corrupt before you even received the board. The good news is, there is no need for an RMA, and the fix is quite simple.

On both boards there is a sticker on the AGP slot which contains the correct MAC address for your controller. All you have to do, is manually enter this MAC into your bios. It is located right under the option in bios to enable onboard NIC.

On the LPB model, you will have 2 MAC addresses for each onboard NIC controller. You can use trial and error if youre not sure which one is for the nvidia NIC.

Reboot, and your done! If you flash your bios a lot, and dont want to manually set it each time, you can also set it in windows.

How did you figure this one out? Good post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i guess this is only for people who's lan was DOA?

My lan was fine to start, but it would stall on large file downloads. It seems that it doesn't stall after entering the mac address, but I have to experiment more with it to be sure. Thanks for the tip.

Yes I reccommend that everyone enable and enter the mac address in the bios. I experimented some more and it definitely solved my stalling when dowloading large files.

julianba said:

My lan was fine to start, but it would stall on large file downloads. It seems that it doesn't stall after entering the mac address, but I have to experiment more with it to be sure. Thanks for the tip.

Click to expand...

I will have to give this a try, as my NIC will just stop working when doing long downloads also. I usually have to reboot to get it back and working. It would stop working again anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. I just started using the GigaEthernet to keep it from doing this. Its nice to know that I can get both NICs working (if it works for me also... from the sound of it, it will). Thanks for the tip everyone!

Rocko,,THANKS..I was wondering why i couldnt get that thing to work ,,,now i can take my pci lan out....Worked like a charm...I had 2 stickers on AGP and i used the one that was printed in Bold Print......Great work

The nVidia NIC is on top of my LP NFII revA (Realtek on bottom), just FYI.

Psyko

Just out of curiosity, can you use both NIC's to double the bandwidth your computer pulls in? Kind of like using a RAID NIC per se. If memory serves, they did this with ISDN many years ago to get speeds of 128 with 2 56k ports working together called dual channel ISDN or something like that.

Also, which one is better to use, the nforce NIC or the realtek one?

If you could do this with these NIC's, that would be too cool.

I don't think "RAIDed NICs" are possible. You could move up to Gigabit for higher transfer speeds though... (I've heard it's not much of an increase in speed though...)

This is an interesting find. It reminds me of when Compaq put out a driver set that changed all machines to the same MAC address. That was fun, having 200+ Compaq machines using the same MAC address on the network at work...

This is not working for me - I enter the mac addy after enabling both "nvidia lan chip control" and "nvidia lan mac address" . After I imput the addy, the one in bold on the agp slot sticker, i hit enter and the mac addy imput still says "press enter" - it does not display what I have imput. After I save to cmos and reboot, the "nvidia lan mac address" is again disabled. What am I missing here?