I recently build a new desktop machine, my first bet on small form factor. I got it up and running with a Asrock B500m ITX/AC and as I did my first speedtest of the 5Ghz Wi-Fi I was astonished by how bad it was!
- Download: 65.8 Mbps
- Upload: 67.3 Mbps
- Latency: 20 ms
Checked out several places on the internet. Most people said that the Intel Wireless AC 3168, and people suggested to play with the settings on the dual band, mixture of disabling 2.4Ghz and just running 5Ghz and other combinations of a/b/n, ac only and other things suggestions (reddit). But it made no change for me.
I accepted it and planned to cable up. As I presented the story to one of my colleagues he suggested that I could just replace and and I saw no, it saw soldered to the back of the board... But it got me curious. Maybe it wasn't? I checked up on a few sites and it seemed like you simple had to unscrew the little tin box off and then it would actually just be an ordinary M.2 standing vertical.
Straight away as I got home I disassembled the desktop - unscrewed the little casing. And bam, there was the little M.2 Wi-Fi module. I popped in a new Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 in instead and went straight to testing.
- Download: 113 Mbps
- Upload: 83.3 Mbps
- Latency: 20 ms
Hmm... Still seems a little low? But then I remember my colleagued asked me if I checked the 5Ghz Bandwidth on my router, and to my surprise it was on 20Mhz. I bumped it up to 160Mhz and...
- Download: 625 Mbps
- Upload: 173 Mbps
- Latency: 20 ms
That's what I am looking for! :-)
