It specifically lists this laptop as being supported. But after much troubleshooting, Googling, and even bringing in Claude to help it’s apparent that this card is NOT supported on this laptop because the laptop doesn’t have USB3.2 Gen2x2, only USB3.2 Gen2x1.
It would only get about 2800Mbps. Claude figured out how to download and compile a newer driver for the card and I still can only get close to 5Gbps.
Has anyone else had a similar experience? I’m about to return this ethernet card.
That does not mean “not supported”. The laptop just does not support the fastest USB3 speed, so you cannot get the most out of the 10G adapter. Thats it.
You’ll notice many 10G USB3 adapters even only advertise the speeds achievable with USB3 10G, because that is the most common thing and many people don’t know that modern Intel USB4 ports have USB3 20G as well, but AMD notebooks do not…
Now that is an entirely different problem, as that is way slower than what 5G ethernet adapters can achieve. Sth. is wrong about the driver or software because those adapters can go way faster on USB3 10G. Just not reach the max of 10G. ~7G of usable transfer bandwidth is what you would expect on USB3 10G.
OK, well when I went to buy a “10Gbps” ethernet card, I think it’s reasonable to expect near “10Gbps” internet speeds. I know there’s always some overhead, but not even getting half the 10Gbps speed on a laptop that is specifically listed on the “Compatible” list.
So yes, I can access the internet using this ethernet card, but I would expect to be able to get speeds closer to “10Gbps” than “2.5 Gbps”.
Like I said, it should get ~70% of its full performance. The rest is probably about the driver version you are using or some settings. Or what you use to benchmark.
Fair enough - thanks for the info. I was under the impression that USB4 was able to handle USB3.2 Gen 2x2 multi-lane ops but that’s apparently not always the case - good to know! I’m curious about the speed reports in that article I linked by Jeff Geerling. Reportedly your USB4 ports handled 7.5Gbps, but that data may have come directly from the WisdPi team. That doesn’t mean the info is FALSE, but I can’t tell if there was something like a separate driver that may have enabled such speeds…
An alternate plan:
You might have better luck with a Ubiquiti device. The following adapter is built to work with a USB4 host: 10G Ethernet Adapter - Ubiquiti Store
There’s also a user in this forum that reports the Ubiquiti UniFi adapter has worked properly for them and handles heat dissipation better than other available 10Gbe adapters (which probably includes WisdPi devices).
On that very product page Framework posts a link to this knowledge base with the sentence “You can check which USB speeds the Expansion Card slots on your Framework product support in this article.”. This is the article below:
Will provide up to 10G speed when installed into Slots using USB 3.2 Gen2x2.
If installed into another Slot that uses USB3.2 Gen2x1 - it will operate, but at 5.5 to 6Gbit/s speeds.
If using a Slot that is less than USB3.2 Gen2x1 - it will result in slower performance. If you would run into this, we recommend using our 2.5Gbit/s Ethernet Expansion Card.
And further down provides links to systems for you to check the speeds of your usb ports for your model framework.
Here’s the page with your model towards the bottom
While it could be clearer at the bottom of the table it says the USB 4 ports are USB Gen 3.2 Gen 2x1 with the other ports being USB 3.2 Gen 2 … an assumption would have to be made that these are gen 2x1 at best as well but probably slower than that.
Yeah, sadly that is another indication of Framework not being able to figure out the correct way to even give consistent port specs, let alone valid ones or even the correct ones. As, when you state USB 3.2 it makes no sense to not give a name in the format of USB 3.2 (i.e. speed X lanes). But consumers should just be given that its USB3 and the speed in Gpbs (5, 10 or 20), which also is the official way to designate this in anything consumer-facing. Because, surprise, surprise that is a lot more intuitive and much harder to get wrong.
Also for some board generations, like the AI 300 / Strix Point board, Framework straight up has contradicting info on the Pro page vs. the non-Pro page. Even though there only is one board and “Pro” is only about the case and peripherals, not the board. They still have not fixed that, because they wrongly spec the AI 300 boards to have DP UHBR20 and USB3 20G support on their USB4 ports.
Even the schematic overviews still contain invalid stuff. We are better of just looking at the AMD specs and leaks of more detailed, internal AMD specs, showing that the AMD mobile CPUs simply have never supported USB3 20Gbps at all. Only Intel has started that with 13th gen / Raptor Lake (which Framework, like many manufacturers basically prevented) until the Meteor Lake / Core Ultra generations, where all USB4 ports also do USB3 20Gbps (Intel in contrast to AMD has nice specs that can clear up what the manufacturers and publications like to get wrong).
That port definition matrix is helpful. It’s funny how many times I’ve pulled up the “expansion card slot functionality” page but never ONCE looked at the relevant definition matrix pages. Thanks for pointing that out!
How are you testing speed, on mine it can do about 7.5Gbit iperf3 with the proprietary driver and 5gbit flat with the kernel 7.2 mainline driver (because of the missing firmware).
Edit: since 7.2 actually released on arch today I did some testing, without firmware it does 4.7Gbit(iperf3) on a 5Gbit negotiated link. With the firmware manually added it negotiates 10Gbit but actual iperf results bouce around between 2.5 and 6.5. I guess performance wise the mainline driver still has an advantage, not sure that’s worth the crashyness.
I have a FW13 7840U and just got the 10G ethernet card. I plugged it into one of the usb4 ports and was getting 5-6Gbps during an iperf3 test. Then I found this reddit post about how to update to the latest realtek driver. ( Reddit ) The guide is written for a proxmox node but with a little help from chatgpt, I was able to follow the steps for my fedora44 install. Now when I run iperf3, I get ~8Gbps which is close to what Jeff Geerling’s youtube video.