Question Could a BIOS update throttle USB wifi adapter download speeds?

[jinxy87]

Hello all! Apologies if this is posted in the wrong area, I'm really unsure who could best help. I'm really at a loss trying to fix this particular issue I've been having, with no luck looking elsewhere on the world wide web. The thread title may seem ridiculous but I'm so frustrated and out of ideas right now that it's the only thing I can think of.

As briefly as possible: My gaming PC connects to my router via a USB Wifi Adapater (TP-Link Archer T2U). It has done so since I first built it, with no problems at all. Download speeds were what they should have been, using the 5Ghz frequency. Now, however, it seems my download speed is suddenly being throttled to 30mbps. It refuses to go over 30 on the google speed test, when previously it was consistently up in the 180mbps range.

Just as a test, I have tried the same wifi adapter in a laptop in the exact same part of the house and it works perfectly, hitting the 180mbps I was used to. All other devices such as smartphones are also working properly and have fast download speeds. So the problem isn't with the adapter itself nor the router. This leads me to the conclusion that there's some issue with my gaming PC, be it hardware or Windows related.

I recently updated to the latest 1616 ASUS BIOS for my motherboard (I THINK that before this my download speeds were fine, but I'm not 100% certain on that). Now, I'm not saying that is the cause of my problem, but I have done nothing else to my PC that I can recall except your typical Windows updates. So I can't help but think something has gone a bit wrong somewhere? I have tried reinstalling the TP-Link driver but the problem remains. I've also tried it in other USB ports on the PC. Can a BIOS update cause a problem like this? Perhaps it's messed up my USB ports transfer speed? Or am I taking crazy pills?

Can anyone smarter than myself (which is most people) possibly think of ANYTHING AT ALL which could be causing USB wifi adapter download-speed throttling on only one machine? If you have any suggestions at all I'd be extremely grateful as I'm really at a loss here.

My PC has been running perfectly in all other aspects. My Specs, if they're needed:
-ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus BIOS 1616
-Ryzen 7600x
-32gb Corsair 5600 Memory
-MSI 6950 XT X-Trio
-WD Black SN770 NVMe
-2 other fairly small SATA SSD's
-MSI MPG 850w PSU
-Windows 11, latest updates
DCOP II and Resizeable BAR both enabled, no other overclocking.
All latest chipset drivers etc installed
(Running an ethernet cable or powerline networking isn't an option for me sadly.)

Thanks for reading, and thank you for any ideas or advice you can provide

 

[bill001g]

Not very likely a bios update did much. USB ports tend to be massively faster than wifi so even if the bios would somehow screw up you wouldn't think it would affect wifi. There are many other things that also use usb so you would think they would have fixed it quickly.

The bios itself does not know or care that you have wifi connected to the port. Changing the bios will not directly affect the wifi.

I would first try the simple thing and use a USB cable to move the wifi adapter away from the PC. It is very common for the signals to be blocked by the case, even more if you have one of those tiny USB device without external antenna.

Maybe windows updated some driver at the same time. Even then the drivers really have few options that would affect speed.
You could boot windows into safe mode with networking but I am not sure if it will support your wifi but it trivial to try.

To eliminate windows as the issue I would try a linux USB boot image. This is a very basic OS image that runs from the USB stick and does not damage your windows install. Almost all have a browser preinstalled so you can run the standard speedtest.

 

[jinxy87]

Not very likely a bios update did much. USB ports tend to be massively faster than wifi so even if the bios would somehow screw up you wouldn't think it would affect wifi. There are many other things that also use usb so you would think they would have fixed it quickly.

The bios itself does not know or care that you have wifi connected to the port. Changing the bios will not directly affect the wifi.

I would first try the simple thing and use a USB cable to move the wifi adapter away from the PC. It is very common for the signals to be blocked by the case, even more if you have one of those tiny USB device without external antenna.

Maybe windows updated some driver at the same time. Even then the drivers really have few options that would affect speed.
You could boot windows into safe mode with networking but I am not sure if it will support your wifi but it trivial to try.

To eliminate windows as the issue I would try a linux USB boot image. This is a very basic OS image that runs from the USB stick and does not damage your windows install. Almost all have a browser preinstalled so you can run the standard speedtest.

Just posting a very quick update, mainly to share my shame, as I found out my problem was self-inflicted (like most turn out to be).

I remembered that a couple of weeks back I was trying to find a way to boost slow download speeds when updating Jedi Survivor in the EA App. Found a thread on the EA forums saying to run Windows Powershell as an admin and input: "netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal"
I did so, but didn't see any improvement, so I undid it with "netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled" and it seems that doing so throttled my PC's download speed to the aforementioned 30mbps without me knowing it had done so. So I'm guessing it was already set to "normal" in the first place and all I did was succeed in turning off whatever the heck it is completely by disabling it. About 20 minutes ago, this all came back to me, so I tried setting it back to "normal" just now, et voila, my wifi is working properly again!

So lesson learned, don't mess around with things I don't really understand, and next time just learn to live with EA's awful download speed!
Classic case of PEBCAK

Thanks for your reply regardless.

 

[bill001g]

Normal is the default value. I think the reason you even see people talk about this is for a while microsoft changed the default to disabled. Not sure why but it has been "normal" as default since windows 10 came out I think.

What this value does is allow more data to be in transit. Most data is sent in large blocks and then the sender waits for a confirmation message. When you set it to "disabled" you limit this block size to 64k bytes so it must wait after every 64k.
The reason you would disable it is if you were getting a lot of data loss. Since the blocks are smaller less data needs to be resent.