Why do PCIe wifi cards not work with this motherboard?

John55 · October 1, 2019

I have the Asus Rog Strix Z270e. It has a built in wifi card that gets 100 percent signal strength but the ping is always high. I bought over 8 different PCIe wifi cards. Each one gets 88 signal strength and the ping is amazing but I get lag spikes. It is like the motherboard is bottlenecking the PCIe wifi card. I did disable the built in card in the bios to see if that caused any issues and the problem is still the same. Does this motherboard just only work with the internal wifi card and just is sensitive to the PCIe cards? Is there a way I can take the built in wifi card out and replace it with an Intel chip? I used Netsh wlan show interface on CMD to test the signal strengths. I also notice that this board has an Intel R 300 series family SATA AHCI controller. Since this board is a 200 series, could that be causing the wifi issues with these PCIe cards? I run Windows 10 x64. I tried using an Asus PCE55 and a Asus PCE AC56 wifi card.

mariushm · October 2, 2019

Have you considered that maybe it's not your pcie slot but maybe your wireless router/access point?

Also, is your router only 2.4g or both, and did you test in both 2.4g and 5g?

5g is faster, but more sensitive to walls, obstacles etc. 2.4g is more resilient and may even have less latency.

Look in the motherboard manual and see if some pci-e slots share bandwidth with other slots and if so, move the card in another slot that doesn't share bandwidth.

Otherwise, even a single lane of pci-e can do 1 GB/s so your network card is not limited.

John55 · October 2, 2019

37 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Have you considered that maybe it's not your pcie slot but maybe your wireless router/access point?

Also, is your router only 2.4g or both, and did you test in both 2.4g and 5g?

5g is faster, but more sensitive to walls, obstacles etc. 2.4g is more resilient and may even have less latency.

Look in the motherboard manual and see if some pci-e slots share bandwidth with other slots and if so, move the card in another slot that doesn't share bandwidth.

Otherwise, even a single lane of pci-e can do 1 GB/s so your network card is not limited.

When I use the 5Ghz channel with the built in wifi card, I get 100 percent signal strength. I tried plugging in the PCIe wifi card and I get 88 which causes lag spikes because of the packet loss. Is the built in wifi card plugged into an M.2 slot? Could I disable those M.2 slots so that the power is focused on the PCIe slots?

John55 · October 2, 2019

@mariushm

Donut417 · October 2, 2019

1 hour ago, John55 said:

CIe wifi card and I get 88 which causes lag spikes because o

Well the antenna you get with the built in WiFi is most likely better. As you can move it from behind the case. Keep in mind that 5Ghz does not penitrate well and yes your computer cause could be blocking some of the signal. But even 80% should be good enough. On top of that Wireless has higher latency. If you need lower latency then you going to need to run an Ethernet cable.