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Help — Wi-Fi adapter throttling speed in a very consistent way (Asus PCE-AXE5400)

dev2077
Star I

Hello, everyone! Recently bought an ASUS Wi-Fi PCI-E adapter Asus PCE-AXE5400, and having troubles with it. I'm trying to use it as a 5GHz Wi-Fi hotspot for my VR headset, and it throttles down speed as if on a schedule. In VR it creates a horrible experience.

For testing, I connected my 802.11ac phone to this hotspot and ran an iperf test to max out the channel (of course I was using local IP addresses) and started monitoring the graph in the task manager — I'm on Windows 10.

Here are the results of my testing:
Normally, the speed is ~350 mbps, which is normal for 802.11ac;
However, every ~57 seconds the speed drops down and oscillates between ~115 mbps and ~188 mbps every second. It goes on for ~3-5 seconds and then it snaps back to ~350 mbps.
The same was happening with another 802.11ac phone.

What's even more interesting is that when I'm just playing games in VR I'm using just around 80-90 mbps, even "throttled" 115 mbps would've been enough for it, right? Well, no! When I'm using 80-90 mbps it throttles down all the way to 20-30 mbps instead! So it always throttles to about 30% of what's currently being used?

The problem only exists when I am using the device in hotspot mode. When I am connected to my phone's hotspot, identical tests show no sign of speed throttling.
The problem persists if I am creating a 2.4GHz hotspot.
Bluetooth is physically not connected. Drivers for Bluetooth are not installed.
When I initially start the hotspot, task manager says "802.11ax" under Connection type. When any device connects, it swaps to "802.11b" and persists until I restart the hotspot. However it seems it's just a decoration since 350 mbps is definitely not something 802.11b could ever manage.
I couldn't get any temperature data from the device because it seems it lacks a sensor.

I am honestly out of options at this point and it's driving me insane. Things I tried:

  • Installing the latest driver (obviously, it didn't work without it at all)

  • Googling

  • Tweaking antennas

  • Setting everything to be 802.11ax only and wireless mode to only 5GHz instead of dual band in device's properties

  • Disabling "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" in Power Management tab of the device (and of the "Wi-Fi Direct" virtual adapter)

  • Reinstalling the driver and updating the driver from the device manager

Please help, it's the only adapter I could find which can host a 5GHz hotspot at least…
I can also try getting some more diagnostic data if you tell me what tools to use, but honestly I just hope that somebody had such a problem before and found a fix. Everything about this problem, those 30%, those almost exactly one minute intervals between throttles, all that just seems so specific and exact…

And please don't worry to suggest something I already said I tried if you are somewhat sure it might work, I'll try it again anyway, not much left to do

1 REPLY 1

jzchen
Zen Master I

I suggest manually downloading the Windows driver from ASUS’ download site, uninstall the current driver, then install the ASUS official driver.  I don’t trust device manager to always get the correct driver.