HELIOS 300 Slow Internet

SniperCT · August 2018

I have a fresh install of windows 10, updated drivers, reinstalled drivers, latest bios, and I'm getting speeds anywhere from 16-30 mbps on a 120mbps connection. My wife's alienware, sitting equidistant from the router and near me gets the full speeds. I've adjusted wifi settings, tried both 2.4 and 5g networks, disabled auto tuning, rebooted modem and router, verified all my router settings as normal, disabled QOS on both router and laptop, and still same issues.

I adjusted all the power settings for maximum performance as well. After all of that my speeds were in the 30-60 range, still about half of what it should be. My upload keeps spiking over 100mbps which is bizare, but it's only happening on this one PC.

Wireless adapter was disabled when I booted into safemode with networking so I wasn't able to test that way, and doing diag startup with MSCONFIG disabled my network adapter entirely.

Is there something I've missed? I thought it was my network but every other device on it gets 100mb+. I'd just like to reliably get 80+ on this thing.

sri369 · August 2018

How WiFi works in terms of speed specified:

100 Mbps = you get only 50, reason being that the 100 is divided into 50 up and 50 down.

My old 6 year old laptop gives me 30-35 Mbps when connected to Wifi on a dual channel router.
My predator came with a dual channel WiFi card and on the same router this gives me about 60-70 Mbps.

But... when I connect the same to LAN physical cable I get the full 200 Mbps speeds.

Check the card specifications between your wife's laptop and yours. Maybe her's supports higher speeds and more channels.

SniperCT · August 2018

sri369 said:

How WiFi works in terms of speed specified:

100 Mbps = you get only 50, reason being that the 100 is divided into 50 up and 50 down.

My old 6 year old laptop gives me 30-35 Mbps when connected to Wifi on a dual channel router.
My predator came with a dual channel WiFi card and on the same router this gives me about 60-70 Mbps.

But... when I connect the same to LAN physical cable I get the full 200 Mbps speeds.

Check the card specifications between your wife's laptop and yours. Maybe her's supports higher speeds and more channels.

This laptop is less than a year old, with an AC network card, connected to an AC router. My internet connection is 120 down by 10 up. This has nothing to do when the 100 being halved, that doesn't even make sense.

I'm getting half the speeds of the laptop right next to me on the exact same wifi network using the same test sites. (speedtest.net, speakeasy, and speedof.me). We don't test at the same time.

SniperCT · August 2018

For the record here are the specs of the wifi device in this laptop

Wi-Fi Standards

802.11ac Wave 2
802.11n
802.11a/b/g

Wi-Fi Spectral Bands

2.4 GHz
5 GHz

Peak speed

867 Mbps

Channel Utilization

20/40 MHz
20/40/80 MHz

MIMO Configuration

2x2 (2-stream)

Wi-Fi Features

MU-MIMO

Acrid · August 2018

sri369 said:

How WiFi works in terms of speed specified:

100 Mbps = you get only 50, reason being that the 100 is divided into 50 up and 50 down.

My old 6 year old laptop gives me 30-35 Mbps when connected to Wifi on a dual channel router.
My predator came with a dual channel WiFi card and on the same router this gives me about 60-70 Mbps.

But... when I connect the same to LAN physical cable I get the full 200 Mbps speeds.

Check the card specifications between your wife's laptop and yours. Maybe her's supports higher speeds and more channels.

Apparently you don't know how WiFi works that's the funniest thing I've seen all day.... 50mbs up LOL
I mean, didn't you see that he said his wife already gets 100+???

Acrid · August 2018

On a more serious note, do you have a router/modem combo or do you have a dedicated router? If you do not have a dedicated router, or have a bad router my guess would be that your router just doesn't have the bandwidth for all of your devices. I have the same laptop as you but no problem with WiFi speeds. (not to mention the Helios 300 has a good WiFi card in it) One test you could do to see if it was your router bandwidth is go into your router and delete all devices but your laptop. Make sure no device but your laptop is connected and see if you get the same speeds.

sri369 · August 2018

Acrid said:

Apparently you don't know how WiFi works that's the funniest thing I've seen all day.... 50mbs up LOL
I mean, didn't you see that he said his wife already gets 100+???

Speed vs. Throughput

Let's first define terms. People tend to talk about "how fast" their wireless connection is or its "speed". What they typically mean is the number that Windows reports in its Wireless Network Connection Status window as shown below.

This number is only distantly related to the actual throughput of your wireless connection. What it shows is the link rate of the connection. Link rate is also referred to as PHY (or physical layer) rate, which is the maximum rate that bits can theoretically move across the network link.

Throughput has many definitions, but I like Wikipedia's:

In communication networks, such as Ethernet or [Wi-Fi], throughput or network throughput is the average rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel. (emphasis mine)

In wireless communication, there are two main mechanisms working against successful delivery of the email, web page, YouTube video or game controller movement (the "message" in the above definition) you want. First, there are lots of bits used for communicating information other than the actual data you are trying to send or receive, or overhead. Then there is the inherent unreliability of a wireless connection causing data to be resent, i.e. retransmission.

Both of these mechanisms use bandwidth that otherwise would be available to you. The result is that you are lucky if your actual usable throughput is half the "speed" that Windows shows you. To restate and oversimplify, "speed" is what is theoretically possible, "throughput" is what you actually get to use.

Anyways... this discussion on speeds and throughput ends here.

sri369 · August 2018

SniperCT said:

For the record here are the specs of the wifi device in this laptop

Wi-Fi Standards
802.11ac Wave 2
802.11n
802.11a/b/g
Wi-Fi Spectral Bands
2.4 GHz
5 GHz
Peak speed
867 Mbps
Channel Utilization
20/40 MHz
20/40/80 MHz
MIMO Configuration
2x2 (2-stream)
Wi-Fi Features
MU-MIMO

My G3-572 has a card with similar specs as yours (https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qca6174a-dual-band-wi-fi)
My Internet speed is at 200 Mbps down and 10 up. I tested these for you to compare.
LAN cable: 235 Mbps
2.4G: 95 Mbps down
5G: 220 Mbps down

So here's something you could try: when you select 5G, try selecting various bands and seeing which one gives least interference (translating into higher speeds). On my router I set a specific channel instead of default auto.

Sgmuffle · December 2019

Hello, I have found that FUNCTION F3 and then Function F3 has fixed it every time. Make sure to do it every time you reboot or if it seems to be running slow.

xapim · December 2019

Sgmuffle This is an old thread but thanks for the input youre just basically disabling and enabling the wifi adapter anyway

Fivesmaster · January 2020

Sgmuffle said:

Hello, I have found that FUNCTION F3 and then Function F3 has fixed it every time. Make sure to do it every time you reboot or if it seems to be running slow..

I also have very slow wifi, apprix 30mbps, when it should be 110...just did the F3 idea and it works!!!! thank you. Is there any way to solve this without having to hit F3 every time??
thank you