Raspberry Pi 5B NIC performance

• Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5B with WaveShare 26848 PCIe card
• Date: 2025-02-26
• Service: Quantum 940/940 Mbps
• OPNsense: no Pi 5 support (yet)
• Test Command: speedtest -s 8864
  • ✓ Test Server: [8864] 0.00km Seattle, WA by CenturyLink
  • from CenturyLink (174.21.67.56)...
• Multiple tests were run, the fastest results are shown.

Why?

If you were wondering if a Raspberry Pi 5 with a PCIe ethernet adapter would make a decent router, this data is for you.

FreeBSD 14 - Ethernet PCIe

FreeBSD doesn't yet support the built-in NIC or WiFi (missing from UEFI).

✓ Latency: 3.039572ms Jitter: 259.578µs Min: 2.677445ms Max: 3.574334ms
✓ Download: 890.08 Mbps (Used: 1137.17MB) (Latency: 9ms Jitter: 3ms Min: 2ms Max: 15ms)
✓ Upload: 672.70 Mbps (Used: 823.94MB) (Latency: 8ms Jitter: 4ms Min: 3ms Max: 17ms)

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Raspberry OS

Debian 12.9 (bookworm), Linux pi5 6.6.74+rpt-rpi-2712

Ethernet (eth0)

Download: 825.59 Mbit/s
Upload: 529.44 Mbit/s

Ethernet PCIe (eth1)

Download: 762.78 Mbit/s
Upload: 525.11 Mbit/s

WiFi (wlan0)

Download: 57.66 Mbit/s
Upload: 63.83 Mbit/s

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Ubuntu trixie

Ubuntu Trixie 24.10 sees the PCIe card (lspci, lshw) but my attempts to enable by installing r8168-dkms failed to get it working.

Ethernet (eth0)

Download: 859.35 Mbit/s
Upload: 762.57 Mbit/s

WiFi (wlan0, 1x1, WiFi 5)

Download: 68.37 Mbit/s
Upload: 90.77 Mbit/s