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Realtek Gigabit adapter failure on GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev. 1.0) motherboard

So, I was helping a friend out the other day by troubleshooting their PC, & had pulled out my video card (HD 7450) to swap in theirs (turned out their HD 4850 was getting fried).  After putting my video card back in, my PC wouldn't connect:  it said there was no Ethernet port installed, & it was no longer showing up in Device Manager.  It hadn't given me any trouble previously, & aside from pulling the video card I hadn't made any hardware or software changes that day (had downloaded a driver update the week before but hadn't installed it yet).  I'm running Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), BIOS is version F4, have 8GB of DDDR (1333), with a Phenom II X4 970 BE (3.5GHz) processor.

I tried a System Restore (no effect), then had Device Manager scan for new hardware.  It brought it back that night... but the next day the same thing happened (no Internet, no Realtek Ethernet), & this time Device Manager wouldn't redetect it.  I tried reinstalling the driver (both from the original Gigabyte disk & with the downloaded driver), but no response.  I bought a new Tenda Gigabit adapter for the PCI slot, & that's working just fine (auto-detected on boot, didn't even need to use the driver disk).  But it seems like the PC takes longer to get to the POST screen (like maybe 30 seconds or so longer).

Is this a typical problem with the Realtek 8111E onboard adapter?  Is this an isolated issue on my motherboard, or do I need to start worrying about the board going bad?
Thermaltake V3 mid-tower case, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 board, Phenom II X4 970 CPU, 8GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1333, WD Caviar Blue SATA-III 1TB, WD Caviar Green SATA-III 1TB, LG Super-Writer DVD-RW, XFX Radeon HD 7450 1GB, Thermaltake TR2 750W PSU

Re: Realtek Gigabit adapter failure on GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev. 1.0) motherboard
« Reply #1 on: December 19, 2013, 01:27:45 pm »
OK...so almost a week with 30+ views but no replies.  Should I take this to mean that this is a problem unique to me?

I can't RMA the board, as that will leave me without the board.  Which tempts me to just pick up a new version of the same board to fix it.
Thermaltake V3 mid-tower case, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 board, Phenom II X4 970 CPU, 8GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1333, WD Caviar Blue SATA-III 1TB, WD Caviar Green SATA-III 1TB, LG Super-Writer DVD-RW, XFX Radeon HD 7450 1GB, Thermaltake TR2 750W PSU

klh591

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Re: Realtek Gigabit adapter failure on GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev. 1.0) motherboard
« Reply #2 on: December 19, 2013, 02:54:34 pm »
I installed and used about 20 (a number of different revisions) of that board and never had a problem with that connector.
I did have a problem just like this with one of the gigabyte 700 series boards. Instead of wasting my time troubleshooting
and possibly never finding the problem I turned the connecter in the BIOS OFF and put a cheap network adapter card in
to replace it.  It turned out to be the same Realtek chip as on the motherboard and used the exact same drivers. No
problem after that.