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Ethernet connection loss on mac studio

My new mac studio keeps losing connection. I have read somewhere that this can happen if the energy saving is turned on. So I have turned that off, but still having the issue. I can work online and all of a sudden it just freezes up and i lost connection.

Posted on Jul 13, 2023 3:00 PM

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Posted on Jul 13, 2023 5:35 PM

10Gb Ethernet:

"energy efficient" drops power to the 10Gb Ethernet chip to save energy. It is NOT compatible with Top Speed. In the hardware pane, under Duplex, set: “Full-Duplex, Flow Control” NOT “Full-Duplex, Flow Control, power efficient” to disable power saving and boost top speed.


The Mac Studio has a 10Gb Ethernet port. This 10G Ethernet port is NOT compatible with speeds slower than ONE-Gigabit Ethernet. It is also NOT compatible with cables that have fewer than all four pairs available for data (NO power-over-Ethernet allowed.)


If you have some fancy equipment at the other end of the cable, it is possible it is trying to make a 10Gb connection. A 10Gb (or 5Gb or 2.5Gb) connection is only stable when cables are excellent and fairly short (like Category-6 rated cables under 100 feet). If either of those are not true, or you have you added patch cables that are not Category-6 rated, you could be seeing it connect at a faster-than-Gigabit speed, then error out and disconnect.


The setting [√] ABV/AEV mode   selected on the hardware pane of advanced Wi-Fi or Ethernet OR in your Router may constrain the connection in unexpected ways that could limit overall performance. The feature is used ONLY for prioritizing video streams.


7 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 13, 2023 5:35 PM in response to jtr959

10Gb Ethernet:

"energy efficient" drops power to the 10Gb Ethernet chip to save energy. It is NOT compatible with Top Speed. In the hardware pane, under Duplex, set: “Full-Duplex, Flow Control” NOT “Full-Duplex, Flow Control, power efficient” to disable power saving and boost top speed.


The Mac Studio has a 10Gb Ethernet port. This 10G Ethernet port is NOT compatible with speeds slower than ONE-Gigabit Ethernet. It is also NOT compatible with cables that have fewer than all four pairs available for data (NO power-over-Ethernet allowed.)


If you have some fancy equipment at the other end of the cable, it is possible it is trying to make a 10Gb connection. A 10Gb (or 5Gb or 2.5Gb) connection is only stable when cables are excellent and fairly short (like Category-6 rated cables under 100 feet). If either of those are not true, or you have you added patch cables that are not Category-6 rated, you could be seeing it connect at a faster-than-Gigabit speed, then error out and disconnect.


The setting [√] ABV/AEV mode   selected on the hardware pane of advanced Wi-Fi or Ethernet OR in your Router may constrain the connection in unexpected ways that could limit overall performance. The feature is used ONLY for prioritizing video streams.


Jul 13, 2023 5:57 PM in response to jtr959

Above is correct, save for a detail or two.


Per Apple, the 10GBASE-T (10 GbE) port is compatible with 100BASE-T (100 MbE), given a Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable.


Details: About the 10 Gigabit Ethernet port on Mac - Apple Support


The port should also work with 10 GBASE-T capable PoE switch, too.


And yeah, older patch cables and older wiring won’t necessarily play very well with 10 GbE. For reliable 10 GbE, Cat 5e+ (350 MHz), or Cat 6, or better is needed. (Yeah, Cat 5e+ 350 MHz isn’t part of a standard, but various vendors were selling that before 5e solidified at 100 MHz. I installed a lot of it, too.)

Jul 13, 2023 5:30 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Actual Speed:

The good way to check the actual connection speed USED to be Network Utility, But in Catalina and later, Apple has deprecated Network Utility and now you have to use a Terminal command to see your actual connection speed. First, you need to know what en number the link is. then you use a command like this one, substituting the actual en number.


my main Ethernet connection uses BSD name en2 (as shown in) :

 menu > about this Mac > (system report) > network:


Aquantia AQC107-B0:


Name: ethernet

Type: Ethernet Controller

Bus: PCI

Slot: Slot-3

Vendor ID: 0x1d6a

Device ID: 0x87b1

Subsystem Vendor ID: 0x1d6a

Subsystem ID: 0x0001

Revision ID: 0x0002

Link Width: x4

BSD name: en2

Kext name: AppleEthernetAquantiaAqtion.kext

Location: /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleEthernetAquantiaAqtion.kext

Version: 1.0.64


Terminal command:


ifconfig en2 | grep media


with this as my output for 10 Gigabit Ethernet:


media: 10Gbase-T <full-duplex,flow-control>

For ‘regular’ Gigabit Ethernet, you should get this instead:


media: 1000baseT <full-duplex,flow-control>


Jul 13, 2023 5:32 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Errors detected:

To see if an Ethernet link is throwing more than a handful of initial errors, you can use Terminal command:


netstat -I en5


This is the resulting output. Counters are In-packets, In-errors, Out-packets, Out-Errors, Collisions. There should never be more than handful of errors from starting up, and in most cases, NONE.


Name       Mtu   Network       Address            Ipkts Ierrs    Opkts Oerrs  Coll

en5   8163  <Link#4>    00:01:d2:1a:00:dd   696697     0   484301     0     0

en5   8163  grantsmacpr fe80:4::461:ea0d:   696697     -   484301     -     -

en5   8163  192.168.0/23  192.168.0.204     696697     -   484301     -     -


If the link were running beyond its ability to run and be stable, for example it auto-speeded to 10Gb but the cabling could only reliably support 2.5Gb, we would see non-zero errors counts, and errors increasing over time. (and possibly, disconnecting)

Ethernet connection loss on mac studio

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