These are the signed, WHQL drivers that were posted to station-drivers.com. They have not yet appeared on Intel's website. (Update: It's now on Intel's website; see post #10.)
A diff of the INFs for these new 17.1.x vs. the old 17.0.x drivers reveals a new toggle option in the advanced driver settings pane, called "Throughput Booster". The default setting is "Disabled".
I wanted to see just what this Throughput Booster does, so I ran some benchmarks on 11ac (I didn't bother with 11n on 2.4GHz).
Base station: Buffalo WZR-1750DHP with DD-WRT 24865M. Explicit and implicit beamforming enabled, 80MHz channel in U-NII-1.
Client: Laptop with a 7260 card. Approx. 1 meter away from base station. Laptop was kept in the exact position and angle throughout.
Test: Each test done used iperf2 for 15 seconds and a 1MiB TCP window. 10 tests per run, with the highest and lowest results discarded. The lowest, highest, and average of the remaining 8 tests are shown.
Version 17.0.6.1 (old driver)
Downlink: 447-467 Mbps, average of 461 Mbps
Uplink: 367-377 Mbps, average of 374 Mbps
Version 17.1.0.19, "Throughput Booster" off (new driver, default settings)
Downlink: 429-433 Mbps, average of 431 Mbps
Uplink: 300-310 Mbps, average of 305 Mbps
Version 17.1.0.19, "Throughput Booster" on (new driver)
Downlink: 429-432 Mbps, average of 430 Mbps
Uplink: 360-381 Mbps, average of 371 Mbps
After the tests, I did some switching back and forth between the drivers and settings to make sure that these results were consistent, and yes, they were. They're also consistent across hard power-offs (to clear the firmware that is loaded into the card's volatile memory).
So... basically, the throughput booster in 17.1 affects only uplink... and it just restores the uplink performance to where it was with 17.0.
A diff of the INFs for these new 17.1.x vs. the old 17.0.x drivers reveals a new toggle option in the advanced driver settings pane, called "Throughput Booster". The default setting is "Disabled".
I wanted to see just what this Throughput Booster does, so I ran some benchmarks on 11ac (I didn't bother with 11n on 2.4GHz).
Base station: Buffalo WZR-1750DHP with DD-WRT 24865M. Explicit and implicit beamforming enabled, 80MHz channel in U-NII-1.
Client: Laptop with a 7260 card. Approx. 1 meter away from base station. Laptop was kept in the exact position and angle throughout.
Test: Each test done used iperf2 for 15 seconds and a 1MiB TCP window. 10 tests per run, with the highest and lowest results discarded. The lowest, highest, and average of the remaining 8 tests are shown.
Version 17.0.6.1 (old driver)
Downlink: 447-467 Mbps, average of 461 Mbps
Uplink: 367-377 Mbps, average of 374 Mbps
Version 17.1.0.19, "Throughput Booster" off (new driver, default settings)
Downlink: 429-433 Mbps, average of 431 Mbps
Uplink: 300-310 Mbps, average of 305 Mbps
Version 17.1.0.19, "Throughput Booster" on (new driver)
Downlink: 429-432 Mbps, average of 430 Mbps
Uplink: 360-381 Mbps, average of 371 Mbps
After the tests, I did some switching back and forth between the drivers and settings to make sure that these results were consistent, and yes, they were. They're also consistent across hard power-offs (to clear the firmware that is loaded into the card's volatile memory).
So... basically, the throughput booster in 17.1 affects only uplink... and it just restores the uplink performance to where it was with 17.0.
Last edited: