Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210NGW

Received an Intel 6E AX210 in the mail today from China that was ordered 10 days ago..
With a non 6E router the reported max date rate and current data rate is exactly the same as I got using an AX200 and Killer AX1650.
This is an MSI GS60 2PL notebook from 2014
I'm using the original antenna wires although I got a new set with the AX210NGW
Choose an attachment and right click on the image then choose view image to make larger.

 

Only Difference between the AX200 and AX210 is Bluetooth 5.2 and the pre-certify of Wifi 6E aka 6Ghz Width however it may never become a 6Ghz wireless if they change the specs or until there is routers to support it.

 

We've all seen the same speculation.

If it does it does if it doesn't it doesn't....so what.

 

Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 working perfectly on my Area-51m R2

 

Spartan,I'm glad to see you got your AX210 also.
After installing the AX210 in the GS60 notebook and reentering passwords to connect to the 5ghz SSID my inSSIDer software rcommended moving from channel 36 to 52(dfs) so I logged in to my Netgear RAX120 router and chose channel 52(dfs) and the usual warning popped up about radar.
On channel 52 I saw good connection strength and current date rate but after a few minutes on channel 52 it automatically moved to channel 104 where I've never been before.
The data rate is excellent on 160mhz channel 104 with some fluctuation between 1,900 Mbps and 2402 Mbps from the same line of sight and 15' distance from the router as I normally am on the living room sofa.
At the line of sight 15' distance from the router the connection strength is a bit weaker than I was seeing with the Killer AX1650.
Router firmware is up to date and Intel WiFi driver is the latest.

 

10 days is better than expected for the connex!

I wish I could find the spectrum to get 160mhz working but, this is a new AP and already on the 3rd firmware version within 6 months of them starting to sell it. If they were to do a 80+80 option I would be golden for wire speeds and not just PHY speeds of the link between the AX200 / NWA210AX.



I will commend Zyxel on the stability and lower latency I've been getting used to since switching out from a card/AP to a solo AP via Ethernet outside of my server case.

AX channel recommendations vary depending on the analyzer app you're using and the sensitivity of the device to surrounding RF but, until 6E is released we're stuck with this high/low option for anything above 80mhz bandwidth which gets you around 1gbps on 6.

**Moving from AX200 >> AX210 shouldn't be an issue from the driver standpoint but when I moved to AX200 it picked up drivers and "worked" but was hobbled until I actually went and updated the drivers to get full speeds out of it.

 

I've never seen such speeds before on the Killer AX1650, this is with me connected to my VPN (hide.me). ISP Speed is 600 MBPS down / 200 MBPS Up:

 

While I now do see better signal strength and steady theoretic limit Date Rates at or near 2,402 Mbps and -29dBm while in line of sight and within 15 feet(3M) of the RAX120 router Uploads and downloads speeds have not changed at all.This is to be expected since they are dependent mostly on IP service.
My ISP has little to no competition in this area so cost is high unless bundled with cable TV that I don't want.
The 5ghz band in my townhouse community is heavy in the 36 to 48 channel range but I can still manage high rates using them.
The DFS channels are much better while on them but I get kicked off frequently.Tyhe 160mhz 104 channel was excellent while was on it.

 

It's a struggle with competing signals. I was on 56 (DFS) and that was stable and fast while set at 160mhz but getting 80mhz out of it but a PHY of 2gbps. I switch to something in the 100+ and it works but then DCS kicks in and scans things and drops for 1-2 mins. DCS on 80mhz picks a 14x channel @ 80mhz as well even with a lower channel specified. I'm thinking it's a firmware bug that is causing the drop / resync during a scan and they'll get it fixed in the next release.

Depending on your ISP though there are some backdoor options sometimes in negotiating a lower rate for a higher speed. I did this in the past with Comcast by using their forums to get in contact with someone to lock in a $89/mo for gigabit for 2 years vs the retail rate which at the time was $130/mo. At least with gigabit you can test up to line speed w/o upgrading everything beyond 1gbps if you don't already have it in place.

Dropping the power on the AP though might be able to sneak into the 160mhz if the competing signals aren't strong enough to interfere but then unless you're sitting on top of the AP the speed might not be there as if you would have @ 30db power. If the devices competing for spectrum were a bit smarter about not stepping on each other life would be easier and they wouldn't get as many contacts about crappy service.

 

In the Advanced adapter settings.

 

The Intel 6E AX210 is now available on the US Amazon site as wireless card only or as a desktop PCIe x1 add in.
More expensive than ordering on ebay from China but you can get it in a few days.

 

The Intel 6E AX210NGW has been working extremely well since installing it in a 6+ year old MSI GS60 2PL notebook that originally shipped with an M.2 NGFF type AC7260.

What is very disappointing is that an MSI GS75 bought new in July 2019 can not be upgraded to Wireless AX at all.The AC9560 is the end of the road for MSI with 8th and 9th generation Intel CPU notebooks that shipped with the AC9560 that's CNViv0
The Intel AX201 is CNViv2 and not compatible.

 

The Intel 6E AX210NGW is available on Newegg with shipping from the United States,not China.
https://www.newegg.com/fenvi-wi-fi-...i 6e&cm_re=wifi_6e-_-9SIADXZCVU3551-_-Product

 

About to upgrade the Killer AC-1550 in my m15 to an AX210NGW (Wise Tiger). No spare antennae in the box.

The user manual is useless. Basic question: how do I ensure the antennae are connected the right way? Any colour convention, symbols to look out for? Can't see much on the picture @WhatsThePoint posted apart from the obvious wire colour difference, suggesting the connection order might matter..

 

Just take the wires off the existing card and put them on the new one.

 

@etern4l you test it and compare the results. For me, one option works fine, the other results in terrible wireless performance.

 

It's a very simple process.Your present card has 2 antenna wires attached to the 2 posts on the wireless card.
Slowly detach the antenna wires from the AC1550 by slightly moving them from side to side while lifting upward.
Then remove the screw holding the card in the M.2 socket.Wiggle the card a bit to pull it out of the M.2 socket.
Place the new AX210NGW in the same M.2 socket and put the screw back in to hold the card in place.Center the antenna wire connectors over the posts on the AX210 and gently press them in.On my cards it didn't matter which wire color I put on each post but test to see if you are getting good speeds.
If you have the plastic antenna wire hold down put it on.The cards from China had it included but I don't see it in the Amazon ad.It prevents the Antenna wire connectors from coming off the card.
I use the FREE inSSIDer program to see the Wi-Fi channels used by my neighbors and pick ones in my router setup that are least used.The FREE Rampart Agent program will show your connected band and theoretical data link speed
https://www.metageek.com/products/inssider/
https://www.metageek.com/products/rampart-home/

 

Done. A funny story about the antenna wires actually. The Killer AC 1550 had two wires:
1. White, attached to the left port with WHITE arrow and "MAIN" inscribed underneath
2. Black, attached to the right port, with BLACK arrow and "AUX" inscribed underneath

The AX210 card though had the port colours reversed!
1 .Left port was BLACK / MAIN
2. Right port WHITE / AUX

I guess it's hard to agree whether MAIN port and wire should be black or white across the industry...

Well, took the call to go by the board layout and inscriptions, and all went well. Very happy with the upgrade from the 2x2 Wave 2 AC which was already no slouch at 160MHz.

At a distance of about 30ft and 2 walls I was getting about 80-90MB/s down, 40-50MB/s up to my NAS - this went up 40-50% to 133MB/s down, 70 MB/s up.
At short range the throughput went from 145MB/s down, 90 up to this lol:



It seems like there is some bottleneck/conflict on the download route, a bit of a channel contention is there so 6E could help, alternatively could be hitting current NAS I/O limits. Either way, as it stands this is close to maxing things out. Many thanks for all your help guys.

As for the channel selection, I've left the router on full auto for now and it seems to be doing a great job.

 

A quick way to check the NAS is to WIRE to it and perform a speed test. If you're running 2 drives you should probably be maxing out at 200MB/s or 400MB/s depending on how you have them configured for Raid or JBOD.

For instance I'm running Raid 10 w/ spinners and that's 4 x 8TB drives which are rated for 200MB/s and with Raid 10 it's a Raid 0 + Raid 1 for speed / redundancy. So, since 1 of each pairing is a copy it doesn't increase speeds but since there's 2 pair of drives it doubles the IO to 400MB/s.

If I went Raid 0 across 4 drives it would potentially hit 800MB/s over the wire.

As for speed measurement just drag some files to get an accurate picture of speeds vs using Crystal Disk. Synthetic testing doesn't really prove much other than max speeds of the controller / media.

 

Yes, ideally I would do some testing using wired 2.5G, unfortunately I only have one adapter at the moment, and I don't really have to because it's clear that the RAID1 using 7200rpms drives optimistically rated at 220MB/s is the bottleneck. When I copy a file directly within a single NAS volume I get 60MB/s lol (surely, this is due to the additional seeking overhead)..

Good point on the CrystalDiskMark Q32T1 5x1GB result overestimating the speed achievable during Samba copy, which for me peaked out at around at "only" 170-185MBs rather than 200MB/s when writing to the NAS.



I have yet to understand exactly why this is the case, but it seems that the benchmark may be using some multi-streaming to increase performance (hence the 32 queues). Basically it's probably the upper bound on the overall throughput. I thought it might have been some caching, but Increasing the file size to 32GB in CDM didn't make much of a difference.

I also tried a third party copier (TeraCopy) - no difference. I guess benching rsync might be interesting.

Of course, the cool thing about this is that there are no 1GBps soft-caps on either the NAS or AP side... Overall, I'm more than happy with the setup for now, the next step would be a NAS upgrade to max out the 2.4Gbps wireless connection in the first place - either to RAID10 as you suggest, and/or by adding an SSD cache.

 

185MB/s is good considering where things started.

I wouldn't bother tinkering with anything else until something really needs to be addressed since you already know the can of worms is sitting there cracked open from our previous discussions leading up to the initial upgrade we're at now.

My focus on the NAS is to take a deep look at whether you have the space you need?

Planning for the next iteration whether DIY or pre-fab. You get a lot more bang for your buck building one over buying one. NAS vs BYOR is easier as you're not dealing with the network hurdles and configuring as much.

 

Intel has not enabled 6Ghz in the drivers yet. If you want to use 6Ghz on W10 you need to do the following (Get driver 20.30.0.11 and do a regedit change in the Intel WiFi subkey):

To get 20.30.0.11 driver you need to get it via Killer Control Center Jan 30th package as it’s not available on Intel’s site yet:
https://support.killernetworking.com

Next click install, it will halt stating no Killer hardware found, don't close.
Next go to C:/Users/ "User Name"/AppData/Temp/
There look through newly created folders and find the one with the Killer .msi file and extract it, it will get you the drivers, in a folder labeled 11ACW.

1. Open RegEdit
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
3. Under it open SYSTEM
4. Under that open ControlSet001 or ControlSet
5. Under it Open Control
6. Under that Class
7. Then find the key that contains Class Net (Actual key ID varies by individual so won’t make sense to post ID)
8. Under it click on 000, 001 or any numbered subkey until you find the one that mentions AX210, and add the DWORD there.

Is6GhzBandSupported= 00000001

 

In order to use the 6Ghz we need a router which supports it, at the moment only Asus sell it, with his ROG Rapture GT-AXE11000, am I right? Do you think other devices with the support for the 6Ghz will arrive soon?

 

The Netgear Tri Band Nighthawk RAXE500 should be arriving next.Just like the Asus the Netgear is almost exactly like it's predecessor but has added the 6ghz radio in place of one of the 2 x 5ghz radios.It's $50 more than the Asus AXE11000
I don't know when the TP-Link AX206 will be arriving or their 6E Mesh offerings.
Linksys also hasn't announced any release dates.

 

Until these come down under $300 they're somewhat pointless in getting mass adoption.

 

So you should upgrade to AX210, most if not all PC manufacturers provide PCIe lanes to their CNViv connectors, hence the E/A connector on the card. Think of cnVi as a budget low cost adapter with the real logic on the CPU. However nothing prevents connecting a true PCIe adapter in the same socket.

 

thanks Tech Junky. That's a helpful tip. We'll need to watch the latest release of the Intel drivers and see if they enable the 6GHZ band by default.
I'm about to do some extensive tests on my latest purchase of an AX210ngw card. I bought the FusionFutures brand card - https://amzn.to/31plJaV from the UK.
Used the drivers from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/do...t-Wireless-Software-and-Drivers-for-IT-Admins and updated.
So far, I'm getting a solid 1.2gbps connection on a Ruckus R510 access point, but looking to test with the trick you've posted on an R550 and see if I get any better results.

Will report back with my findings from a local disk test to my Synology DS416play (4x drives, SHR Synology hybrid raid)

 

Yeah, 1.2gbps / 2.4gbps there seems to be a single client cap at 1GE even though they sync higher w/ 2.4GE. For local transfers I hit 1.25gbps when my source/targets are capable of much higher IO. Typical transfers of multi-gig files tend to land in the 800mbps range through automated copies. Manual copies max out at the full 1.25 (1GE) speed. I tossed this at the MFG for my AP and pushed them on it as to why it wouldn't hit the full 2.5GE port speed over WIFI and didn't get anywhere with them other than them saying to hook up an additional endpoint to the 2nd 1GE port to get a wired client + wireless client to hit the max 2.5GE speed which doesn't make sense if the radios / client sync @ 2.4gbps it should therefor work at that speed minus overhead which isn't 50%. Mind you I'm using a W!FI6 not 6E AP but, it still should work for more than 1GE despite them saying it does when blending the wired/wifi technologies across the backhaul. I tried to pin them on the QOS mechanism being the culprit since some of the command outputs show it being capped at 1.25gbps despite running on a 2.5gbps port. I think it's a design flaw on their part and they won't own up to it. If I have to sync things that require better throughput I have a 5GE USB port for a direct connect.

Glaringly though the R550 won't be breaking any records with a 2x2:2 setup or the mac PHY @ 1200mbps

I'm running a 4x4:4 setup with the NWA210AX.... read more

If these damned OEM's would make products that compete wired speeds it would make designing office spaces so much easier than screwing around with over priced insufficient equipment.

 

If you upgrade to Windows Insider, it looks like a fully functional Intel 6Ghz capable driver is now available without requiring any tweaking as of yesterday.

 

I'm a bit pissed at windows at the moment and their "upgrades" that break stuff. I had one patch this week that caused random power / reboots. Another one that caused something else to not work right. It gets to be a PITA to install / remove / patch / remove again when it's supposedly resolved. I set my WU to manual other than alerts so it doesn't repeatedly try to fix itself with more broken crap. Intel's getting on my don't install list as well lately with driver issues.

 

I've using W10 x64 version 21H1 newest buld and I'm not experiencing the issues you describe.
My Internet is also OK pairing a Netgear RAX120 with a few AX210 on latest driver.
With billions of different hardware and software combinations employed on Windows installations I find it amazing that there's not many more issues with updates.
The talent pool working on Windows development is not what it once was.
Cost cutting has it's results front and center.

 

Being selective about which updates get applied I max out my speeds at a Gig w/o issue. I fought the fight with Zyxel to lift the 1G barrier but, they're playing stupid saying using a client + the additional 1GE port on the AP will max it out at 2.5GE but, that's not how it should work if the 1GE isn't being used it shouldn't factor into the QOS which is limiting the client to 1GE over WIFI.

Anyway... I've been in "tech" for quite awhile at this point bot as a living and as a hobby. I have plenty of experience figuring out issues and reverse engineering them to the source issue. I base the issues on what fixes them. The fixes lately have been removing recently installed updates as the symptoms appear shortly after installing them and rebooting. The power issue was a bit odd though as I had bought a new power brick last fall that started showing an issue with random reboots that became more frequent as time passed to the point of multiple times per day. Switching back to the OE PS resolved the issue. Recently though one update triggered the same random reboots to occur and removing the update resolved the issue. This type of thing shouldn't be happening if proper QA is being done before pushing releases to machines. The power/reboot thing leads to unnecessary troubleshooting and expense when having to test power for a fault.

Individually though my AP isn't an issue / my AX210 isn't an issue / W10 isn't an issue but, when they play together pieces of the bigger picture become an issue with crappy driver QA. In the OSI model you should start with L1 which is physical when TSing issues but, when an issue is introduced higher up the chain it leads to issues with figuring out the issue / solution as quickly. Intel has been pushing more and more updates this month alone that it's concerning that they're breaking things and trying to pin down an issue rather than taking their time to do it right the first time. There's something being brewed behind the scenes causing all of these updates to be pushed and we all become the guinea pigs for their crappy driver packages which they sort things out. MSFT in general is a good idea to skip updates for a week or two while everyone else battles with what gets broken in the process and then coming back tot hem if there's isolated issues reported rather than tons of blog articles about things being broken.