The TP-Link TG-3468 is a cheap PCI Express (1x) gigabit network card currently retailing for £5.98 on Amazon UK, the question i was wondering when purchasing the TP-Link TG-3468 was is this network card actually any good? The TP-Link TG-3468 appeared to get generally positive reviews on Amazon, however some of them did contradict each other. To cut a long story short it works fantastic on Windows 8.1 x64, however read on if your wanting to know a little more.
Installing the TP-Link TG-3468 Network Adapter
Really its quite hard to say anything here other than it just works, i placed the TP-Link TG-3468 in a spare PCI express slot, power on my PC and that was that. Windows 8.1 booted and i had a network connection as soon as Windows had booted to the desktop. I didn’t have to even download any drivers. Windows 8.1 recognised the TP-Link TG-3468 as a Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller and installed a driver from the 10/05/2013.
Drivers on a CD included with the TP-Link TG-3468 support Windows XP, Vista (32bit and 64bit editions), Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit editions), however any Windows OS after XP will simply have drivers or download them from Windows Update. So needless to say if you have a version of Windows released in the last 12 years this Network Adapter will just work. I can even confirm it works with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Apparently various Linux distributions also have support out the box too.
TP-Link TG-3468 File Transfer Speeds
With the TP-Link TG-3468 i was able to copy files from my Windows Server 2012 R2 server to my Windows 8 PC at 93MB/s or 744mbps. I have no doubght the only limitation here is likely the hard drives i was copying from / to. I was copying from a Western Digital Green 4TB 5900rpm SATA3 hard drive to a Western Digital 500GB Green 5900rpm SATA3 hard drive. I’m sure with a faster drive the card would have been pretty much maxed out. Although 93MB/s is a lot higher than any of the reviews mentioned on Amazon. So basically if you wish to move large files around on your network the TP-Link TG-3468 will do the job perfectly.
Supported Features on the TP-Link TG-3468 Network Adapter
- ARP Offload
- Flow Control
- Interrupt Moderation
- Jumbo Frames (9KB)
- Large Send Offload V2 (IPV4 and IPV6)
- NS Offload
- Priority and VLAN
- Receive Buffers
- Wake On Lan
- Speed and Duplex
- TCP Checksum Offload (IPV4 and IPV6)
- Transmit Buffers
- UDP Checksum Offload (IPV4 and IPV6)
- Wake on Magic Packet
- Wake on pattern match
- WOL & Shutdown Link Speed
Something else worth mentioning here is that some Amazon reviews stated only 4K jumbo frames were supported, however i can select up to 9K.
That’s about it really, in conclusion i don’t think for £6 you will be disappointed with the TP-Link TG-3468, it should be a great network card for the majority of people.
