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momokrono

Member

Registered: 2016-10-27

Posts: 54

WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

Hi,
I recently bought a new pcie wifi card with an intel AX200 chip. It got instantly recognized, as shown from lspci -k

03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (rev 1a)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 0084
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi

The problem is that when I compare wifi speed over both 2.4 and 5 Ghz, this card is way slower than a D-Link usb one 2.4 Ghz only.

In particular, with the usb one I'm able to reach 4.5-5 MiB down / 2 Mib up, when on my pcie card the respective speeds are 0.5-1 MiB down and 0.5 up.

Searching online I've found that iwlwifi is the correct driver for this new chip while with my previous realtek one I had a specific dkms one.

Has anybody experienced the same? Could this be a possible bug in the driver/a faulty card?

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,307

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

You could try to switch to software cryptography. (swcrypto=1)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne … ss#iwlwifi

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,612

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

What does your signal strength look like?   What is the output of iwconfig

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momokrono

Member

Registered: 2016-10-27

Posts: 54

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

You could try to switch to software cryptography. (swcrypto=1)

I already tried, my actual iwlwifi.conf file is the following
cat /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf

options iwlwifi power_save=0 swcrypto=1

I also, when I looked at the wiki article after installing the card, tried to disable power saving since it is reported to increase the quality of the connection in some cases.

What does your signal strength look like?   What is the output of iwconfig

Signal strength is good, -55 dBm for my pcie card and -60 for my usb, as i was expecting. Both of these values are from running iwconfig.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 74,269

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 5#p1939135

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momokrono

Member

Registered: 2016-10-27

Posts: 54

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

Ok that was interesting: initially setting TSO off gave me a slightly better upload speed but after further testing I noticed a weird behavior.
In particular when trying to switch from 2.4 to 5 GHz and back it looks like, sometimes, I can't properly connect to the network, and ultimately when going back to 5 GHz both down and upload speed drop to around 100 / 20 KiB respectively and 2.4 GHz access points became not visible. Setting TSO on produced a weird output and did not fix the problem, but a reboot did.

# ethtool -K wlp3s0 tso on

Actual changes:
tx-tcp-ecn-segmentation: off [requested on]
tx-tcp-mangleid-segmentation: on

This happened last night, this morning everything seems fine but trying to set TSO on still produces the same output. If the connection problem will happen again I'll post my journalctl, yesterday I was too tired to even realize it exists.

I may also try the LTS kernel and see if this changes anything, hoping at least to have better a download speed since, for now, the TSO off looks like did something good.

Thank you all, I'll keep you informed.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 74,269

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

Sanity check: do you have a parallel windows installation?

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momokrono

Member

Registered: 2016-10-27

Posts: 54

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

No, I don't, just arch.

One thing I tried is to enable antenna aggregation, which did nothing, tried disabling 802.11n, which made things worse, than I re-enabled it and now download speed seems fine, around the 4 MiB/s my connection can actually sustain, and considering that before was around 1-1.5 this is a big improvement despite being basically where I started...

Upload speed is... weird. It tops at 500 KiB/s, basically the same I had at the beginning, but this time tends to stay at that speed instead of hovering around 200-300 with peaks of 500. Definitely my connection can be the bottleneck here, from my phone I am reaching the same speed.

This time however I don't have TSO turned off. If I try to set it off and then back on this time I end up with:

Actual changes:
tx-tcp-segmentation: on
tx-tcp-ecn-segmentation: off [requested on]
tx-tcp-mangleid-segmentation: on
tx-tcp6-segmentation: on

so I think I'll let it on by default as it is after every boot, since I really don't think may be a reason for what is going on.

FPSUsername

Member

Registered: 2021-09-03

Posts: 17

Re: WiFi speed with an Intel AX200 too slow

I tried it and with a ~40-50% signal strength, the link speed often dips under 68.8MB/s and downloading (for example updating with pacman) is very slow, where download speeds are roughly 2MB/s, whereas I have a 200Mbps up/down subscription.
At this signal strength, Windows 10 has no issues at all to achieve at least a 200MB/s link speed and just download at near full speeds.

I tried turning TSO on/off with ethtool, but that didn't change anything.
PS: Connection is witth 802.11AX

On my desktop I have the AX210 (and assumingly stronger antennas, but the signal strength is around 50% as well, reported by the KDE widget) and there I have no issues either.