I just bought the D-Link 500T after hearing that Ethernet is actually faster than Usb, stable and other things. i have set the MTU and MRU to 1492 and speedguide says optimized for broadband PPPoE. fine so far. i would like some advice on the Ethernet thing that nvidia installs (i didnt install Nvidia firewall), when i go to NETWORK in the devicemanager and click on the Nvidia Nforce Networking and press Properties there are tons of clickable options like CHECKSUM OFFLOAD, FLOW CONTROL, OPTIMIZE FOR ...and so on. is there anything specific i should set in there to optimize my connection? the tray icon says i'm connected to 100MBPS (used to be 768k with my old modem) why is it showing wrong?! Your help much appreciated.
The connection between the modem to ur NIC card is 100 Mbps...and if I remember well USB 2.0 runs on 480 Mbps so it is faster then a Cat5(100 Mbps) cable but not faster then a Cat5e (short distance 1 Gbps) or Cat6 (long distance 1 Gbps) cable. The bottleneck of ur connection is again the modem connection outside ur house, a 100 Mbps connection between u and then modem does not help to make ur connection faster in ur case a 10 Mbps would be enough I am sure u can enhance ur connection by playing with those values on ur properties of ur nfoce 4 ethernet port but again why do u want to do it ? Anyway never saw the point of it.
you would be better off increasing the buffer of your network card using the windows registry making the nic card more responsive and also using a freeware tool called "cablenut" that sets up a full profile for tcp/ip, not just send/receive window size. personaly i'm using a Cat6 cable for the phone line that connects to my router and another Cat6 from the router to the network card, again and like most cases it top's at 100Mbps but its more then enough for my 8mb adsl line, i just choose to use shielded cables to insure a pure connectivity. www.cablenut.org http://www.j79zlr.com/cablenutXP2k.php (to setup a custom profile for your connection) http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1607 (apply these tweaks for better lan performance)
Ethernet is much better when dealing with Modems/Routers etc, USB causes way too many problems I've found. Your connection will just show up as 100MB, even though your connection can be 1500 or 512 etc. USB on the other hand shows the exact speed of your connection. Your fine, don't worry about it.