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Your cart is empty.Product Description
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RTL8126 Chipset
It enhances data transfer speeds, supports various data rates, and provides stable and reliable network transmissions.
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Excellent Heat Sink
Organ cooler design for fast heat dissipation and stable network card performance.
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Seamless Upgrade, No Cable Changes
This card works with CAT5E cables, eliminating the requirement for expensive CAT6 cables.
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USB Flash Drive Included
Users can simply plug in the USB drive to install the driver and start using it without any complicated procedures.
chrisc
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2025
Works as expected nice having faster Ethernet! Plug and play with windows 11.
Marc H.
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2025
I do have to say that it will reach up to 5.4Gbps but boy oh boy does it get HOT! You'll probably want to try to point a fan at it if you're going to be consistently running 5Gbps connection, but other than that, it's perfect! I'm not one to trust to download drivers from a sketchy USB stick that was included, but as long as you download the drivers from Realtek, it works perfect!It does not work out of the box without the drivers. Windows defaults to the wrong driver. You'll be stuck at 1Gbps until you update the drivers, but the drivers are probably included in the usb stick, I'm just not sticking that into my pc.When you check the drivers, be sure it says "Realtek PCIe 5GbE FAMILY Controller." If it says something other than FAMILY CONTROLLER, you've got the wrong driver.Perfect little card, other than the heat, it's a 10/10!
Rhiyddun
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2024
Reassuringly, they had a driver on the mfr website, unlike some others.. but after installing it, it's slower than the 2.5Gb NIC I wanted to replace it with. Uses a Realtek chip, Realtek signed drivers, but I doubt it can actually hit 5Gb. The "website" based speed tests (Speedtest from Ookla mostly) even the Google and Frontier sites can't seem to get much beyond 2.4Gb with anything, probably about the limit of web browser based stuff. I'll be writing a speed tester intended to work at high speeds soon. I ended up using a "surplus" Supermicro NIC with honest-to-gawd Intel X540 hardware and driver.
vMax65
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 3, 2024
I have two seperate fibre broadband connections coming into the house...One for work and one for the family. I decided to setup a home network and needed a second nic into the PC to utilise both connections and this Wavlink 5Gbps PCIe Network Card was just the ticket especially to allow for growth as broadband speeds increase.Installation was a doddle (easy) and the drivers were automatically installed by Windows 11. They do provide a USB stick with all the drivers including different versions for Windows, MAC and Linux! This card also includes a low profile bracket and works with all versions of Windows. Interface wise, it will work on any PCIe slot so x1/x2/x4/x8/x16....The card is very well made with a nice heatsink. No issues in terms of connecting the ethernet cable and it all just worked. Both my internet connection, one from Virgin and one from Sky are 1Gbps so both fibre and fast with max download rates of just under 1Gbps.....I decided to team the connections and managed just under 2Gbps as seen in the screen captures.Overall, very happy and I will update this review as I setup a home server network to really use the 5Gbps speeds via a proper LAN network....Still a lot to learn to extract the max out of this card, but I have taken some time before posting this review to make sure it worked not just for the short term but for the long term and it has not failed at all.
ksinbln
Reviewed in Germany on August 12, 2024
Diese 5 GBit/sec Netzerkkarte konnte ich mir kostenlos bestellen. Wie immer versuche ich, dass diese Tatsache meine Bewertung nicht beeinflusst.Im Lieferumfang des schmalen kleinen Kartons befinden sich:- Die Netwerkkarte (mit passivem Kühlkörper)- Ein alternatives Slotblech für "Low Profile"- Ein Kärtchen mit einem Downloadlink für Treiber (wurde noch wichtig, s.u.)- Ein USB-Stick (!) mit den Treibern für eine Vielfalt von Betriebssystemen, allein Windows von 98 über ME, XP, Win7 .. bis zu Win11. Ebenso diverse Linux Varianten, BSD, MacOS, usw.Schön an dem USB-Stick ist auch, dass dort nicht, wie auf den meisten CDs, die Treiber für 10 verschiedene Karten enthalten sind, die man ohne Ziffernklauberei nicht auseinanderhalten kann, sondern tatsächlich nur die Treiber für genau diese Karte. Sehr gut.Die Erstinstallation der Karte ging auch einfach:Einstecken, Rechner starten, Windows installierte einen eigenen Treiber für diesen Realtek-Chip und die Verbindung funktionierte sofort mit meinem aktuell nur lediglich 1 GBit/sec Switch. Schaute man im Gerätemanager, so sah man den dort installierten Windows-Treiber - und in den Eigenschaften, dass dieser neben der automatischen Aushandlung der Geschwindigkeit nur auf maximal 2,5 GBit/sec fest eingestellt werden kann, nicht auf 5.Also installierte ich mir vom USB-Stick den Realtek-Treiber für Windows 11. Auch das klappte einwandfrei. Allerdings funktionierte anschließend mein Netzwerk nicht mehr. Auch nicht ein manuelles Einstellen auf 1 GBit/sec half. Ich schaffte es nicht, das Netzwerk zum Laufen zu bringen.Als nächstes schaute ich dann auf der Webseite des Herstellers, die auf dem blauen Kärtchen angegeben war. Und hier schon einmal ein Lob: Die genaue Produktbezeichnung steht tatsächlich eindeutig auf der Verpackung der Karte, und genau damit ließ sich auch der Treiber über die Suche der Webseite finden. Sehr löblich. Zudem war die Treibersammlung sehr aktuell (August 2024, also nur wenige Wochen alt).Nach der Installation des neuesten Treibers funktionierte dann auch meine Netzwerkkarte sofort. Ich konnte sie auf "automatisch aushandeln" stehen lassen.Insofern ist also mein einziger Kritikpunkt, dass ausgerechnet der Treiber auf dem sonst vorbildlichen USB-Stick leider nicht funktionierte, jedenfalls nicht "out of the Box". Dank der gepflegten Webseite war das aber auch leicht behebbar.Alles in allem kann ich ansonsten nichts an der Karte aussetzen. Zumal ich Realtek ohnehin mehr mag als Intel, weil es bei Realtek weniger künstliche Funktionshindernisse gibt.. Ich denke da nur an den Einsatz in einem Server...
Mr. Thanwa Chan
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2024
Good card for upgrading from 1 giga bit to 5 giga bit, can upgrade an older PC to modern day.Most useable for server / internal LAN transfers as well as future proofing for when we get faster internet.Comes with a USB with drivers on it. I found this is unnecessary if you are connected to internet, as Windows can automatically update this. Might be useful if you are installing fresh windows otherwise serves no purpose. It is virus free; not sure why one reviewer was concerned about that. Windows Defender can detect these things, don't need any fancy anti virus software.I found data transfer rates between my main PC and my network hard drive server (which is using this card) a lot faster now. the new bottleneck of the speed is the hard drive write speed instead of the network speed.Easy to install uses a PCI-E slot in your desktop, I can recommend this card for sure but the price range this product is advertised in is not far from the 10 giga bit version..
Jacob Wagner
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2024
I bought this because it does 5G and fits into a x2 pci e slot. Finding the drivers on the realtek website is a bit of a pain but doable. I've ran this in linux and windows. I have 5G google fiber, with this card I get about 3000 mbit down and 5000 mbit up, but I'm assuming google fiber just isn't giving me the full down speed.One time when I reboot my computer from windows> linux the card just stopped working. I'm not sure what happened, but I took the card out and put it back in and it works again. Overall everything is great. My ping time to the google server on speedtest.net is 1 ms. That's fast, folks!
JHoney
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2024
The card seems alright. You get a high and low profile bracket with screws. Black PCB. Standard orange/green activity LEDs mounted on either side of the network port (not integrated). I pulled the heatsink, and was a bit surprised there is no thermal pad or compound. In practice this chip doesn't produce a ton of heat (it can even be run without a heatsink at all), but I added a thermal pad anyway.The driver situation for this chipset seems not great. Both on Windows and Linux I had to download and install Realtek's driver manually. Wavlink does include a flash drive (64MB, where did they even find this thing?!) with the drivers so at least they tried to mitigate the issue.== Realtek Windows Driver ==Windows 10 wouldn't get a driver automatically. I downloaded the Win 10/11 driver pack from Realtek, and the install was uneventful. I used iperf2 to run a test server and tried saturating it with two 2.5GbE clients. Performance was already limited by my PCIe gen2 slot, but the card was still a bit worse than I expected at 3.14 Gbps. I was expecting to see closer to 3.4 Gbps. I also tried it with the card connected at 2.5GbE, and here I achieved a tad low 2.37 Gbps.== Mainline Linux Driver (not usable) ==On Linux I was at least able to get a link up with the kernel's r8125 driver, but it had issues. First I tried it connected to a 5GbE SFP adapted switch port, and it could bring the link up, but performance was abyssmal, 5-20 Mbps. To rule out some other things I switch to a 2.5GbE port, but here it would only negotiate 1000BaseT link speed. Then I noticed the driver had configured the device not to even advertise 2500BaseT.== Realtek Linux Driver ==The driver installer doesn't handle secure boot signed drivers. It just spits out a dumb error and continues on like nothing happened. More realtek rubbish. After dealing with manually signing the key I had to blacklist the r8125 driver, update initramfs, and reboot to ensure the driver loaded properly. Then it wouldn't link up. Finally when I reset my PCIe enclosure it came up... at 100 Mb/s. After reseating the cable I finally had a 5Gb link.I'm still limited by the PCIe gen2 slot, but this time I got closer to expected results with 3.31 Gbps which is still a bit short of the 3.44 Gbps I expect. With a 2.5GbE connection I was able to saturate the link properly, achieving 2.47 Gbps.
Devonne Bingham
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2024
Did not work at all for me. Installed to my pcie slot and does not work. Was wondering if it was the driver included on the flash drive that was the issue so I went to the website and they do not recognize or support this item. Do not buy
Cat-Gun
Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2024
Easy plug and play network card upgrade to 5Gbps. I used this on a Dell Omniplex and installed Opnsense to use as a DIY router for additional control and security of my home network. The ability to keep up with the speeds I'm able to get from my ISP is a very nice perk. I like that this comes with brackets for both full size and low profile set ups.
Will
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2024
This card is really easy to fit in to a PC and its plug and play on windows.I found that the connection is very stable and I didn’t notice and latency or packet loss.The package also has the low-profile bracket so you can fit it in to a mini pc for example or a small server.Good value for money for a great network speed / reliability upgrade.Recommended.
Thomas
Reviewed in Germany on October 30, 2024
Ich habe den Artikel kostenlos im Rahmen des Vine Programms zur Verfügung gestellt bekommen, was meine Bewertung aber nicht beeinflusst.Der Netzwerkadapter wird mit zwei Slotblenden geliefert, um sie auch in kleineren Gehäusen mit reduzierter Höhe nutzen zu können.Eine Treiber USB Stick und kurze Anleitung wird mitgeliefert.Der Karte reicht ein PCIe 1x Slot. Mehr lanes helfen nicht, aber schaden auch nicht, da die Karte auch in breitere Slots passt.Als Chipsatz ist der Realtek RTL8126B verbaut der vom aktuellen Windows 10 oder 11 erst nach Treiberinstallation erkannt wird.Die Geschwindigkeit wird wie bei meinen anderen getesteten Netzwerkkarten eher durch zu geringe Prozessorleistung als durch die Netzwerkgeschwindigkeit beschränkt.Für die mit dem Glasfaseranschluss möglichen höheren Geschwindigkeiten oder für ein schnelleres NAS ist man damit vorbereitet, wenn der onboard Chipsatz nur 1 Gbit unterstützt.Nun muss man sich die Frage stellen, reicht 2,5Gb oder gibt man in etwa das doppelte für 5 Gb aus.Die gängigen switche unterstützten entweder 1 Gb, 2,5Gb oder 10 Gb.Für direkte Verbindung zweier PCs reichen aber 2 5Gb Adapter und ein mindestens CAT 7 Kabel.Wer nicht gleich auf wesentlich teureren 10 Gb Karten wechseln will, für den sind die 5 Gb Karten schon zukunftssicheren. Zu bedenken wäre, das die Rechner die Daten auch schnell genug verarbeiten müssen, so dass es dann schon ein Recht aktueller PC sein muß.Bei ca. 37 Euro ist der Preis angemessen und er bekommt 4 Sterne.
LegoDude
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2024
Upgraded my home network to 10G and Wifi 7, but my media center PC, due to the smaller system board size, was limited for the slots and speed it would support, so this one needed a 5 GB card.Card worked fine, speeds are great now, and no issues with Windows 11 on this home-built system of mine.
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