I built a PC for my friend and I am at my wit’s end in trying to figure out why the wifi isn’t working well on his PC. MB: Z87-G45 GAMING OS: windows 11 RAM: don’t recall brand, but I think it has 16gb Old Wifi Adaptor: FV-AC2030T (I don’t have the part information for the new wifi adaptor that we bought within the last month) GPU: ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6600 Challenger
Issues: High ping, average was about 80-100 ( not bad ) but it would have spikes of high ping(200+), and there would be anywhere from 5 to 10% packet loss. Info was from using the ping command to reach out to google. Packet loss was also seen when pinging the router directly.
Things I have tried:
- Checking whether it was just the strength of the wifi being an issue. I brought over my own PC and confirmed that my PC’s wifi was better than his.
- Updating the motherboard BIOS and drivers (link to their website) The BIOS was an older version originally (don’t recall which one) but I’ve updated it to 1.9. I updated the drivers to 10.1.1.45 for Windows 10 64. Potentially this is a problem since windows 11 is what is installed.
- ensuring the drivers for the old wifi adaptor were up to date. Did the same for the new one.
- Switching out the wifi adaptor in case the old one was faulty. The one listed above is the old on, I don’t have info on hand for the new one.
- Checked a couple of different RAM module in case 1 was faulty. I think i test all 4 ram modules, alone connected the the primary RAM slot and the wifi was not affected.
As of now, the options I’m seeing are to get a new board, ram and cpu, or installing windows 10 (since the board doens’t come with TPM and may be the cause)
Linux sadly isn’t an option due to the games my cousin plays not all functioning on Linux.
Any suggestions at all would be appreciated.
Have you tried moving his system closer? Have you tried using your system near his location? It’s not just microwaves that can interfere with wifi, but also some kinds of fluorescent lights, or even infrastructure (pipes, electrical, mesh retaining, etc).
What is the signal db loss? Ping is a catch-all metric but isn’t reliable for nailing down specific problems. Also the varying ping times is called jitter, and some jitter is perfectly normal - wifi tends to amplify ping and jitter. Don’t get too hung up on high ping unless it is a problem.
If db loss is acceptable, is his tcp/ip stack compromised? Run a virus check, ensure his network configurations aren’t being hijacked (check dns, proxy, etc). Reset the stack and configs if necessary.
Has his router been compromised? There is firmware that is going around hijacking routers for botnets - very hard to identify and reverse from what I recall. Try another router if you have one. Aside: Might be a good idea to factory reset the router and start with a clean slate too.
Is your wireless network congested? too many devices can cause large ping and jitter, even if they aren’t on your network. Removing devices, changing wifi channels, disabling guest connectivity, and enabling game mode on the router can improve the congestion issue to varying degrees.
TPM has nothing to do with networking, which is good because there are bootable USB OS’s you can run to test your hardware without wiping your current install if you feel like it might be another type of compatibility issue (TPM would make this much harder to do).