So my better USB 3 card arrived, stuck it in and it works fine.

Problem is that when its in there, my PCIe network card (cheap realtek) doesnt work. Physiclaly links to the switch at 100 (or 10?) megabit but normally when booting windows it will re-link at gigabit. This doesnt happen, it doesnt show in device manager.

USB card works fine, shows as a PCIe bridge, and 4 separate Renesas  USB 3 controllers off it. The port the realtek NIC is in has nothing showing below it in device manager view devices by connection tree.

I cant swap slots around as the USB card is a 4x card, and I only have 2 16x slots and 2 1x slots, one of which is blocked by the video card and the video card cant go in the lower 16x slot because of genius motherboard designers putting motherboard headers at the end of it.

So, before I go out and buy a different NIC to try in there (intel perhaps) has anyone had something like this happen before? Was there a simple solution. I am about to go down the rabbithole of disabling other onboard things and seeing if there is a bios update for i7 4790 based this dinosaur.

Currently using the onboard killer craptastic nic that needs to be disabled and reenabled ever 15-20 mins to keep working.