Review on PCIE WiFi Card Networking Adapter by Jen Johnson

I have purchased 2 of these cards and have encountered the same issues with both setups, one at my home (Linksys EA8500 router) and one elsewhere with a different Wi-Fi router installed (Asus, not sure models ). Maps seems to work great for web browsing and other low bandwidth operations like checking email etc. But after being online for a while it crashed and it crashed even faster if you had heavy bandwidth usage. Tasks like watching HD videos or downloading large files. While troubleshooting I found two workarounds that give me a reliable connection and no more crashes. Both workarounds require TP-Link's latest drivers for the card, but it should work with the default driver installed in Windows 10. I've found that the issue occurs when connected to an 802.11ac network (5GHz band). ), which is selected by default if available. The first and easiest workaround was to configure the card to only work with 802.11n or 802.11a in the 5GHz band. Operation is much more reliable and can be set in the device manager settings for the card in Windows. While I didn't test this as thoroughly as workaround #2 below, I was able to get it to fail permanently when connected to 802.11ac by installing large games via Steam, but when connected to 802.11n I was able to download 50 Perform GB to 100 GB. The second installation of this card also uses this workaround and I have not heard any complaints from the user. The second workaround is to make changes to the router to allow this card to work reliably under 802.11ac. The specific issue is the channel width, for some reason this AC1200 card does NOT work reliably with a channel width of 80MHz, ESPECIALLY when there are other 5GHz routers in the area using a channel close to the one you are using . !On my Linksys EA8500 router I had to switch to WPA2 personal security mode and set the channel width to only 40MHz. I still let the card connect to the 802.11ac network in the 5GHz band and with these settings the connection is stable and reliable. I've been testing this over the past few weeks with both large installs of the game on Steam and LAN file shares, and it works great when exchanging hundreds of gigabytes of files. This is a workaround, not a fix! The only way to fix this is to fix the TP-Link bandwidth issue yourself! But these workarounds work reliably if you have one of these cards. The downside of both workarounds is that the Wi-Fi connection is much slower and workaround #1 is MUCH slower than #2 (down) but after implementing workaround #2 and changing the bandwidth, the speed was noticeable about 15 MB/s (but not dropped), although it was faster than 8 MB/s. I had workaround #1 (802.11n). Of course, reliability is more important than speed, but there's no reason why we need workarounds! TP-Link needs to fix this, hence this card only gets 3 stars.