[SOLVED] Can motherboard cause poor (slow) WiFi reception?

[Nikhil Teja]

Machine: Dell Inspiron 14 5447
Original/Stock WiFi card: Intel Dualband Wireless AC-3160
New/Current WiFi card: Intel Dualband Wireless AC-7260

My machine always had poor WiFi reception ever since I bought it. It works totally fine within 2m of the access point, anything more than that makes the WiFi extremely slow (less than 2Mbps). I can also see the signal dropping in the taskbar. I see that many other users of 5447 complaining about the same on Dell's forum too. Since I was an early buyer of this model, I didn't find much info on this back then.

I always thought it's the stock WiFi card that's creating this problem. So I replaced it a better one (Intel AC 7260) hoping it will solve the problem. It didn't. Next I suspected the antenna and replaced it with a new one. Nothing changed.

I gave up and ordered a USB WiFi dongle. No improvement. I tested it by plugging into a different machine (Lenovo Ideapad 320) and it worked really well. This made me really curious about the root cause. It's the OS turn this time. I reset-ed Windows. No change. Installed Ubuntu alongside Windows, still no notable improvement.

What are the odds of new and old antenna and new and old WiFi cards to be faulty? So this time I swapped the antenna and WiFi card (one at a time) with my Lenovo to really isolate the issue. Nothing changed. My Lenovo on the other hand worked really well with the swapped antenna and WiFi card.

I tried updating BIOS, drivers too. Nothing helped. This problem is clearly beyond OS, Drivers, WiFi card, Antenna and Router (yes tried with multiple routers at multiple locations) . Motherboard is the only thing that's left out. Could motherboard in anyway contribute to this issue? or what could be other possibilities?

 

[Lutfij]

Using the service tag for the laptop, see if you can locate the support page for your laptop. On that note, use CPU-Z to show you what your current BIOS version is and cross reference that with the latest BIOS version listed on the support site. If you have a number of BIOS updates pending, gradually work your way to the latest version as opposed to jumping to the latest version. Keep in mind if you need to update your MEO firmware between BIOS updates.

Then check and see what your OS version is(not edition) if you're on Windows 10. As for the question, the problem could be an OS issue, the wrong drivers or a corruption in drivers or that your wireless router might be pending a firmware update as well.