The transition to 2.5Gbps Ethernet has not been an easy one for Intel. The company's I225/I226 2.5 GbE Ethernet controllers (codename Foxville), a prevalent choice on Intel platform motherboards for the last few years, has presented a fair share of issues since its introduction, including random networking disconnections and stuttering. And while Intel has been working through the issues with multiple revisions of the hardware, they apparently haven't hammered out all of the bugs yet, as evidenced by the latest bug mitigation suggestion from the company. In short, Intel is suggesting that users experiencing connection issues on the latest I226-V controller disable some of the its energy efficiency features, which appear to be a major contributor in the connection stability issues I226-V has been seeing.
To mitigate the connection problems on the I226-V Ethernet controller, Intel is advising affected users to disable Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) mode through Windows Device Manager. The same guidance applies to Linux users as well. EEE mode aims to lower power consumption when the Ethernet connection is in an idle state. The issue is that EEE mode seems to activate when an Ethernet connection is in active use, causing it to drop out momentarily.
