I am booting with a Samsung 950 Pro and the boot times are ridiculously fast by my ethernet drivers always seem to be the last to load and I get no network connection for several seconds upon reboot.

I went and downloaded intels latest drivers for the 1218v and went into device manager and changed a couple settings.

Under properties and advanced I changed Gigabit master slave to always master. Although this shouldn't pertain I changed it anyways.

Wait for Link I set to off.

The tab Link Speed should show you speed and duplex. I set this as the correct speed as I believe auto may wait for detection.

Making these changes basically had me connected instantly upon startup screen. I can immediately open the browser and go to a favorite or type an address with no issues. The connection now seems like the first driver to load. 🙂