PfSense nic compatibility issue

So lately I've had a weird issue with my Pf box at home, the WAN throughput chart scales from 0 to 55+Mb/s constantly when the kids are up, Rokus in use.. Ipad, etc.  However Ookla tests always hit a hard limit of 21mb on the download.

Nothing I do exceeds this limit, aside from bypassing Pf.  I questioned my hardware at first.. a Dell Optiplex 320, 1.6ghz P 2140, 2gb DDR2 ram, 80gb hdd, and a Broadcom 5709 dual gigabit PCIe nic.

Cpu utilization, and ram usage never spike.. hell it's hard to get them above 50%.  I was running avahi, pfblocker and a couple reporting packages which I have since removed.
My desktop is Windows 8.1 Enterprise, 8gb DDR3 2100, Core i7 3770 and a wireless N card.  Home network consists of a Netgear gigabit switch, and a Netgear 802.11N WAP.

Now obviously I know.. testing broadband throughput requires no other traffic on the lan segment.  Last thursday night was when I tried swapping my hardware out for a Lenovo SFF, Core2Duo 2.8ghz, 6gb DDR3 box with the same nics but guess what.. Pf would not recognize any card plugged into the PCIe slot.  My guess, damned things BIOS was locked to only being able to use a video card in that slow.. nothing else.  And my nic, the dual broadcom, was a PCIe x4...pc only had the x16 and a pair of x1's.
As a test, I grabbed a x1 broadcom nic from work.. didn't recognize it either.  I've read where Pf can sometimes have issues with Broadcom and Realtek nics, but this fresh 2.1.4 install would see and use the onboard Realtek.. but not the Broadcom.

Ok it's been a few days and I've gotten my PF config all working and working quite well.  I never was able to get the Lenovo box to work correctly because of those broadcom nics.  And I have not been able to determine why.. even the PF community couldn't answer it.  However my overall throughput issue was caused by a bad patch cable.  Yeah.. I know.

The last thing most of us think about is cabling... I have supported networks from the routing to the physical layer for over 14 years and I can count the number of bad cables (ones that had no physical damage) on one and half hands, seriously.

So now I'm able to push my 60mb download to the max and I have been doing so regularly ;)