Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E card disappoints with slower than expected speeds (Solved)

[rmiller1959]

I have an Acer laptop with an Intel AX201 Wi-Fi 6 card. I recently purchased an Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E card to replace it. My smartphone regularly records Wi-Fi 6E speeds of over 1050Mbps on my home network, and I was maxing out at around 750Mbps on my laptop's Wi-Fi 6 card. I was hoping that upgrading to the AX210 would give my laptop speeds similar to those on my smartphone.

While the card was relatively easy to install, reattaching the antennas is annoying because the connectors are so small and have to be precisely aligned to be snapped into place. I got it done, though, and I installed the latest Intel drivers. I was prepared to be impressed by the speed increase. Unfortunately, not only did I not see a speed increase, I haven't come close to the top speed achieved with the previous card; the highest speed I've recorded wth the new card is around 660Mbps.

Don't get me wrong; that is plenty fast for a laptop. However, I'm disappointed that my smartphone's Wi-Fi6E modem achieves much faster speeds than my laptop's Wi-Fi 6E card and that the newer, more advanced card is not as fast at its highest speed as the old one.

 

[d5aqoep]

Haha AX201 on 5Ghz 160 Mhz channel width will have 2400 Mbps link speed which is exactly the same as AX210 on 6Ghz network. In fact, 5Ghz will have better wall penetration power.

For me AX200/AX201 performs almost same as my AX210.

Make sure you have latest drivers for your card which you can obtain from

Downloads, Drivers and Software | Intel

- Download supporting resources inclusive drivers, software, bios, and firmware updates.

www.intel.in

 

[Tech Junky]

Ok, so both should hit the same speeds and the 210 should be more stable. At least this was the case for me when they first launched. I can hit over gig speeds with a 210 on the LAN to my server. I just swapped it out though to test the new 411 and it lived up to the hype so far. Still doing testing with it but, so far it has hit higher speeds by aggregating the two bands.

Open task manager and make sure WiFi is reporting AX and not something else. Go through the advanced options of the adapter and enable everything again. The link rate and actual data never match but it's more of a signal quality indicator.

 

[L&LD]

Download the latest WiFi driver for the AX210 card. Do the same for the Bluetooth device too.

Remove the device(s) from Device Manager. Be sure you click the box to remove the driver too. Reboot, then check that the WiFi and Bluetooth adaptors didn't get recognized and installed again. You may need to do this more than once.

Once the old drivers are fully removed, try installing the new drivers again.

Before you pulled the old WiFi card out of the laptop, you did remove the drivers for it, correct?

 

[RMerlin]

With Intel's NIC, you can go do Device Manager, and in the card's advanced settings enable the Throughput Booster. While this will allow that client to reach higher speeds, it will negatively impact any other client also trying to use wifi at the same time.

AX201 and AX210 throughput should otherwise be about identical. You might gain a bit of performance by moving to the 6 GHz band if you are in a congested area, but otherwise throughput should be pretty much identical, possibly a bit worse with 6 GHz when at longer ranges.

 

[rmiller1959]

Download the latest WiFi driver for the AX210 card. Do the same for the Bluetooth device too.

Remove the device(s) from Device Manager. Be sure you click the box to remove the driver too. Reboot, then check that the WiFi and Bluetooth adaptors didn't get recognized and installed again. You may need to do this more than once.

Once the old drivers are fully removed, try installing the new drivers again.

Before you pulled the old WiFi card out of the laptop, you did remove the drivers for it, correct?

Ha! I should have but I didn't because my research said the drivers were the same!

I should be clear that my expectation of a significant speed increase was due to the presence of the 6Ghz band, which is where my Pixel 6 Pro smartphone resides and regularly reaches speeds in excess of 1Gbps. I even configured the AX210 to prefer the 6GHz band.

So I did a couple of things before I left on travel that improved the AX210 speeds to at least where they were before with the AX201:

• I uninstalled an app called System Mechanic. It seemed like it was having an adverse effect on the Internet speed of my laptop and my hard-wired home theater PC. I can't explain the reason, because I run System Mechanic on my main hard-wired system and my Internet speeds were unaffected. In any case, I saw an improvement in the Internet speeds of the systems from which I removed this app.
• I did a network reset in Windows. That wiped the slate clean and started me from scratch, which probably cleared out a lot of detritus from my network setup. That also seemed to help.

But then this happened! I went on travel for a couple of days with my laptop in tow and came back home, but now I'm regularly seeing 900Mbps-plus speeds and occasionally getting speeds of up to 1006Mbps! I have no explanation for it, but I'm not going to complain. It's almost as if the card needed time to break in!

 

[rmiller1959]

With Intel's NIC, you can go do Device Manager, and in the card's advanced settings enable the Throughput Booster. While this will allow that client to reach higher speeds, it will negatively impact any other client also trying to use wifi at the same time.

AX201 and AX210 throughput should otherwise be about identical. You might gain a bit of performance by moving to the 6 GHz band if you are in a congested area, but otherwise throughput should be pretty much identical, possibly a bit worse with 6 GHz when at longer ranges.

I configured the card to prefer the 6Ghz band, and I think that adjustment helped because there's very little traffic there at present, and I'm close enough to my Orbi wired mesh satellite that range isn't a limiting factor. I tried the throughput booster without a noticeable speed increase.

 

[rmiller1959]

Ok, so both should hit the same speeds and the 210 should be more stable. At least this was the case for me when they first launched. I can hit over gig speeds with a 210 on the LAN to my server. I just swapped it out though to test the new 411 and it lived up to the hype so far. Still doing testing with it but, so far it has hit higher speeds by aggregating the two bands.

Open task manager and make sure WiFi is reporting AX and not something else. Go through the advanced options of the adapter and enable everything again. The link rate and actual data never match but it's more of a signal quality indicator.

I didn't know there was a card higher than the AX210! Interesting - now that I'm getting more of the performance I expected from the AX210, I'm not in a rush to upgrade again, but I'll follow its progress and see how it does.

 

[L&LD]

Get the 411!

It's only $18. 75!

AX411 - $18.75

https://mightygadget.co.uk/tag/ax411/ Picked up a couple of these to play with at 50% less than the Amazon listings for the same cards. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Intel/AX411.NGWG.NV?qs=pBJMDPsKWf20x9LnYd7Bqw%3D%3D...

www.snbforums.com

 

[Tech Junky]

@rmiller1959

There's always something changing or new when it comes to networking. Since the ax411 is geared towards intel only / 600+ systems it's not as discussed in most places. Being locked into the CNVIO / CPU offload of functions it's limited in exposure for testing. Now that I've had it u and running and tweaked some things I consistently hit 1.5gbps or more during longer file transfers when the 2nd band has time to kick in. It's interesting from the aspect that it works but, hard to pin down bandwidth being used on the 2nd band.

DCT version way back in the day was being able to combine 56K channels on dial up / ISDN to get 128K but, this is much more than that but same theory. This is the reason why when looking at WIFI adapters they usually state DBS is 2.4/5 or 2.4/6 but not tri-band. I think from an engineering standpoint it's possible with some additional tweaks to get a client card to be able to do all three bands simultaneously. One issue comes to mind is that current adapters in the space only use 2 antennas. Bein able to splice off a band to a third antenna would prevent cross talk between 5&6. Going to a 4x4 setup would also bring the perks of WIFI 7 speeds to todays wants doubling speeds across the board.

@L&LD

Thanks for the mention of my thread.

 

[rmiller1959]

Get the 411!

It's only $18. 75!

AX411 - $18.75

https://mightygadget.co.uk/tag/ax411/ Picked up a couple of these to play with at 50% less than the Amazon listings for the same cards. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Intel/AX411.NGWG.NV?qs=pBJMDPsKWf20x9LnYd7Bqw%3D%3D...

www.snbforums.com

My Acer laptop has a 10th Gen Intel CPU - is that a problem? That price and the potential performance are tempting! See what you've got me doing?

 

[L&LD]

But, but, @Tech Junky tempted me first! Lol...

 

[Tech Junky]

My Acer laptop has a 10th Gen Intel CPU - is that a problem?

It's a problem if it doesn't do CNVIO2. Check the specs but, I'm fairly sure it only supports CNVIO1.

CNVio VS CNVio2 documentation.

We are seeing multiple complaints of people upgrading from 9560 (CNVio) to the AX201 (CNVio2) and having issues, often completely unbootable systems. The confusion comes from Intel's own documents regarding compatibility. If you follow the support links for both the 9560 and AX201, both pages...

community.intel.com

There's some debate on that thread but, no concrete answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi - mentions 10/11th gen being the inception of CNVIO2.

 

[avtella]

It’s not even just having cnvio2, to have the latest gen card the PCH needs to support it. The 411 will afaik only work with Alderlake based systems and newer upcoming Raptor Lake based ones. Pretty sure you can go backwards but not forwards compatibility wise within cnvio2 (or within 1 respectively). The WiFi chipset itself is not in the card, it’s just an RF module.

 

[Tech Junky]

@avtella

From my understanding of how this interface works you can't float between 1 & 2 at all. Now, why WIKI is showing 10th+ being version 2 vs other sources citing the same ADL+ being the primary target systems and the lack of Intel disclosing this a bit more transparently adds to the confusion. I don't have any 10/11th CPU's to test these theories with since I skipped them based on their lackluster improvements over 8/9th gen weren't compelling enough to make a leap.

Digging into the PCH component vs CPU might be worth someone with one of those systems testing to see what actually happens when putting a 411 into the system. Either it will work or the system won't boot until it's removed. For this sort of testing though I would order through Amazon and then replace with Mouser at 50% less.

 

[Tech Junky]

Intel 700-Series Chipsets For 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs To Feature Increased PCIe Gen 4 Lanes & USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Ports

Intel's upcoming 700-series chipset platform designed around the 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs may offer increased PCIe lanes & USB ports.

wccftech.com

This has a decent chart comparing thee differences between PCH/CPU features.

 

[rmiller1959]

It's a problem if it doesn't do CNVIO2. Check the specs but, I'm fairly sure it only supports CNVIO1.

CNVio VS CNVio2 documentation.

We are seeing multiple complaints of people upgrading from 9560 (CNVio) to the AX201 (CNVio2) and having issues, often completely unbootable systems. The confusion comes from Intel's own documents regarding compatibility. If you follow the support links for both the 9560 and AX201, both pages...

community.intel.com

There's some debate on that thread but, no concrete answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi - mentions 10/11th gen being the inception of CNVIO2.

My research has yielded surprisingly little information. My laptop uses a Core i5-1035G1 Ice Lake CPU, and the Wikipedia article you shared states that, "CNVio2 was introduced on desktop platform with Comet Lake and on mobile platform with Ice Lake." The AX201 that came with the laptop requires CNVio2, as far as I can tell, so that also suggests that it has the necessary interface.

Where I get confused is when it speaks about the AX210 to which I upgraded:

"Likewise, the Wi-Fi 6E AX2xx family of cards, supporting the Wi-Fi 6 at 6 GHz, is proposed in CNVio2 or M.2 form factor: a 0 at the end of the name designates a PCI-E NGFF card (AX200, AX210) whereas a 1 designates a CNVio2 card (AX201, AX211)."

The way this is written seems to make a distinction between the interface and the form factor. Both the AX201 and AX210 fit into the M.2 2230 slot on my laptop motherboard, and both work, so the "CNVio2 or M.2" comment is confusing.

Given what I know, I'm tempted to try the AX411. I just got a new job that's going to require more travel, and I want to max out the capabilities of my laptop. I've already got the maximum 12 GB of RAM, and I'm thinking about a faster M.2 SSD to replace my Western Digital SN750. I might as well do it all in one fell swoop!

 

[L&LD]

So you want to spend more money?

SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen4 M.2 2280 Internal SSD

(I would buy this drive today even for a PCIe 3.0 system. The drive can always be reused in a future laptop purchase).

 

[Tech Junky]

I went with the SN770 for my TB4 enclosure because it beat my SN850 but, the 850 beats it for internal speeds. The 770 runs $100/TB it's dram less.

It's a bit counter intuitive how the 770 hits the speeds it does when most drives / designs have DRAM.

WD Black SN770 SSD Review: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Updated)

Stellar performance, especially for gamers.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[L&LD]

On a laptop, I installed a 1TB SN770 and promptly removed it. The performance and battery life were worse than the stock SSD (don't recall the brand/model, but it may have been an OEM SK Hynix version at 512GB).