If I was choosing a motherboard and saw it had the I-225V or I-226V NIC, I'd probably avoid them and choose another motherboard after my experience with the former. Supposedly Intel has some good NICs (perhaps the ones mentioned above), but the I-226V isn't one of them.
I had the I-225V on my previous motherboard and it was problematic. Hosting a Minecraft instance on said PC as a server would bring the entire network connection down once an outside player connected to it and it would remain down until the PC was restarted. This didn't happen if I used the (also Intel) WiFi, or another two PCs entirely which had different NICs. It was at that point that I started doing some research and found
a lot of others with the same NIC on a range of motherboards reporting the same thing. It wasn't Minecraft crashing... the NIC was crashing. I couldn't believe it, of all things. Went down rabbit holes of trying to change NIC settings/driver versions and nothing worked to stop it. Further research taught me that there was three hardware revisions of that NIC and they all had a range of issues beyond the one I was experiencing, but random cutouts/drops was the prime one. Motherboard makers would of course not offer support if you were impacted by this because even though they chose to use said NIC in their product, as far as they were concerned, it was an Intel/NIC/driver problem, and... Intel did nothing but revise it in later hardware (which does nothing for those already affected) and this still failed to fully resolve the issues. Funny enough, that whole approach of sweeping it under the rug and moving on was foreshadowing the same response they later showed with the recent Alder Lake CPU issues.
Later on, I was seeing article after article (
one here on TechPowerUp) that the successor I-226V was having issues too!?
How after three revisions and a successor does it have those same issues? I'm not sure how much of that may have been resolved since then, but if it's anything like the I-225V was, I'd just avoid it.
On the other hand... Realtek has also had its share of mediocre and problematic NICs and drivers over the years. I don't know if the one you mentioned is one of them though.
