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September 5th, 2021 11:00
First day with 9710 - ended in re-install - killer
I have worked with Dell laptops a lot in the past and now that the 9710 is out I thought I treat myself. It is a gorgeous computer and with the i9 has more than enough power for my needs. After the initial install where both the Dell upgrades and the Windows updates were severely stealing the resources and made the fans run like it was a MacBook Pro 16" (I come from that model). Unfortunately the "killer" Wi-Fi is not really killing it. It is connected to a Wi-Fi access point but it only seemed to connect at 2.4Ghz. The final updates, heck I don't know, three hours in, YouTube was getting very "laggy", to the point where the stream was already 1 minute in until sound started over Bluetooth. This all points to the single chip that takes care of the networking, Bluetooth is also considered a network. Driver version up tp date, well I moved heaven and earth but even forcing it to connect at the AC speeds the situation snowballed.
I do have a Thunderbolt 3 docking station from my MacBook days and connected that to the laptop, bang the issue resolved using the 1Gb port but the Bluetooth was still jumpy and sound was lagging behind. First thing I do when I get a new Dell computer is to run the OS Recovery and I used that to reinstall, which went flawless.
I did some more benchmarking this morning and it truly seems the card only can push about 200Mb on a 1Gb line. In itself that is not too bad for wireless, considering that I have a ton of wireless devices (yes, I have a mesh network).
The only thing I can think of is that the router/access point I got from my ISP is not capable to communicate with this card optimally. Of course I can smack my own wireless router on the line and check if it gets any better. I will have to purchase one so my question here is: If I were to go that route, what kind of router does this community have great experience with? Oh, of course on my LAN line I get 940Mb throughput, but the computer is starting to look like an octopus.


JOcean
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September 5th, 2021 13:00
Having many devices on the router can really drop the speed. We have 1 GB service but with all the devices we have, I am seeing around 360MB/s on the desktop and 150 MB/s on my E5430. As for a type I have always had good luck with ASUS routers in general. And Netgear usually has very good reviews as well.
aelaan
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September 11th, 2021 06:00
I just want to say thanks to everyone that responded, this community is great. My new router handles all our devices with ease, even my daughter noticed her iPhone all of a sudden was much faster.
JOcean
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September 11th, 2021 13:00
Glad to hear it and happy to help out!