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Australia, Canberra
1 Level
723 Review
47 Karma

Review on πŸ’» TRENDnet USB-C 3.1 To 2.5GBase-T Ethernet Adapter: Fast and Reliable Connection Speeds at 2.5Gbps with VLAN Support - Black, TUC-ET2G by Justin Buck

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Unusable, overheating product

Firstly, this is for a 5 GB/S-USB-C box. The middle star rating on this product page is useless as Revain collects them all for different 'colors' which are completely different models. Everything is already misleading. As I said, the thing overheats. So bad? Well, out of the box with the default driver settings in Windows 10, the thing overheats and crashes within 3 seconds of running the iperf3 bidirectional test. For real. Like all USB 5GBase competitors (as of June 2020), this product is based on the Aquantia AQC11u chip. And they all have the same fatal flaw: the chip gets very hot as soon as it's loaded. You can enable thermal throttling (which the driver internally negotiates to 100BaseT when a certain temperature threshold is reached) or enable "5 Gbps Low Power Mode" which reduces power consumption but limits the length of cable used. can use. Now, in my tests, thermal throttling breaks directly in the Windows 10 driver and causes the device to crash when a load is applied in the same way, so it doesn't matter. Enabling 5Gbps low power mode doesn't crash for me (I ran iperf3 --bidir continuously for 20 minutes). I've tested a short 10ft run and a longer 100ft run with the same results, so I have no idea what the limit of "low power mode" is. So you activate the "5Gbps Low Power Mode" in the driver. and everything is fine, right? nope While technically running at 5GBaseT, actual throughput tested with iperf3 in bi-directional mode peaks at around 2.7 Gbps and has a much lower average throughput of around 1.7 Gbps due to some throttling in a direction that comes and goes (it's not clear what's causing this, but it's not my gear on the other end). I've also found that even with the power saving mode disabled, where the device quickly overheats and crashes within seconds, throughput peaks at the same speed (2.7 Gbps). Why does this product even exist? You might as well buy a 2.5 Gbaset adapter. Oh, and another big mistake: Trendnet didn't bother to sign the installer for their own driver in 2020, which is why Windows 10 warns the user that the installer is blocked and the user has to manually bypass this to even get it to install. That laziness and the fact that there have been no driver updates since April 2019 says a lot about what you're getting. Don't worry about this like other USB 5GbaseT adapters as they will have the exact same problems.

Cons
  • A lot of stuff