Review on ASUS PCE AC56 Wireless Express Adapter by Elton Luo

Received: April 4, 2019 OS: Windows 10 Home 1809 (Build: 17763.404) Motherboard: Gigabyte Z270XP-SLII bought this card to replace an Asus PCE-AC55BT which has been having intermittent issues recently. Before installing the new card, I went to the Asus site to get the drivers (the CD that came with it doesn't help me as I don't have an optical drive handy). The website has a download utility, but the driver says a driver is NOT needed as the card is compatible with Windows 10's built-in drivers. But just in case, I downloaded the utility. After installation, the card was identified and the Broadcom driver installs Windows drivers from 2013. I was only able to get 15 Mbit/s with the Broadcom driver. I had expected 300 Mbit/s. (My old card ran at 250 Mbps, but the PCE56 has a better antenna, so I was hoping for more.) Obviously it was useless, so I installed the utility. It turns out (contrary to what the Asus website says) the utility has the correct Asus driver. But after installation I could not connect my card to my wireless router. It connected for a few seconds and then disconnected. Eventually I restarted my router and everything worked. About a minute. We then reverted to a permanently connected/disconnected state. I've been banging my head against it for a while, even changing the PCIe slots, but nothing has worked. I couldn't get the card to stay connected. I ended up reinstalling the utility as a random try, but this time I just chose the drivers instead of the utility and drivers. Suddenly everything started working. And I was able to get my full 500Mbps, honey.