Intel X540 10GbE Networking for Desktop

I’ve been running Unifi kit for a couple of years. I’ve been trying to set up a NAS/hypervisor for a while and never wanted to pony up the cash beyond a Intel X540-based NIC. Eventually, I set up a TrueNAS box using a Topton N18 board with its own onboard 10GbE port. That left me with the spare Intel NIC…

Setup

• Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE
• 10Gtek 10Gb SFP+ RJ45 module
• Windows 11 desktop
• 10Gtek 10GBase-T Intel X540-T2 PCI-E NIC

Installation

The physical setup was trivial. Find an empty PCI-E slot and plug it in. No external power needed. I kept the onboard NIC connected so that I could work on the desktop easily whilst setting up.

First issue, Intel X540 is not supported on Windows 11, only Windows 10. Looking in Device Manager, you should see two new devices with a generic name like Ethernet Controller. Asking Windows to search for drivers yields nothing.

Downloading the drivers manually (ignoring the valid product list, of course) also doesn’t help. The installer checks for compatible NICs and obviously doesn’t find anything.

Fortunately, the servethehome.com community have had, and solved, the same issue.

If you haven’t done so already, download and extract the drivers. In Device Manager, right click the devices and Update/Install Drivers. Then select Browse my computer for drivers. Navigate to the extracted drivers and point to the PROXGB directory.

Select Browse my computer for drivers.

Select the PROXGB directory from the extracted drivers.

You need to select Install this driver software anyway and accept the risks.

A few points to note:

• You’ll have to accept the risk of installing the drivers.
• You’ll have to do it twice when using a NIC with two ports.

You should now see the devices correctly displaying as an Intel Ethernet Controller.

Setting Adapter Priorities

This doesn’t work in all cases, specifically for SMB shares.

Priorities can be set on network adapters to indicate to Windows which should be used.

Go to Network Connections in the old Control Panel.

Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and then Properties.

Select Advanced in the bottom right.

You can now set the Interface metric. The lower the value the higher the priortiy.

Do the same for Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) and the other network adapter (remembering to pick a higher, or lower priority metric).

Priorties don’t work in all cases

Despite setting IPv4 and IPv6 priorities on the adaptors to favour the Intel NIC, Samba shares do not honour it.

Disabling the onboard ethernet adaptor fixes the issue.

Speed Testing

Testing is done by enabling one NIC and disabling the other. We will run two tests:

1. Speedtest to see if there are any differences in internet connection speed. We have a 1Gbps Community Fibre package.
2. TrueNAS SAMBA fileshare write speed.

Onboard Ethernet

Disable the network adapter Intel X540 #2.

Kick off another Speedtest.

Copying a multi-GB zip file to TrueNAS was capped at ~111MB/s (888Mbps).

Intel NIC

Disabling Onboard Ethernet and enabling Intel X540 #2 allows us to test the Intel NIC.