AMD to Steer Motherboard Partners Away from Intel WLAN, Toward MediaTek Co-branded Ones

[ShurikN]

Considering what garbage Intel's AX 200 is on my board, I welcome this with open arms.

 

[mechtech]

If mediatek is equal or better than Realtek for the same price then whatevs

 

[Berfs1]

From my personal experience across several different Realtek and Intel LAN adapters, Intel has had higher performance, and usually does not break with a driver update. Realtek on the other hand, has worse performance at best. Sure you could say that maybe it's just my network setup that's "built different", but I have also been to other friends' houses and helped them with their PC setups too; it's not just my setup, Intel's LAN adapters are just better because they have are always downloadable from Intel's website, whereas with Realtek adapters, usually you are supposed to use the one that is on your motherboard's support page, and I believe this is where the issue stems from. Since you always have customized drivers from the motherboard manufacturers, every manufacturer is making custom driver changes, that increases the variability of successful operation with all Realtek adapters. Not to mention Intel's LAN adapters have much more [useful] settings than Realtek.

Now back on topic, I have no experience with MediaTek, and I have not heard of that company prior to reading this article. RANT: I mean AMD really could just use Intel's LAN adapters and not be stubborn about it but, okay I guess they want to do their best to ensure competition even if it means the consumers will have a shit experience, as was the case with the infamous USB dropout on Ryzen, and I bet you they even will attempt to deny all allegations of LAN problems at the beginning of the launch.

Considering what garbage Intel's AX 200 is on my board, I welcome this with open arms.

Have you installed the from the motherboard manufacturer? Or from Intel? Also check your wifi card's antenna connections (internal and external), even a loose connection will cause problems, and in most cases it's a loose connection on the internal side.

I simply stated that there's nothing wrong with their products. Take it or leave it. Instead you're accusing me of things that didn't happen.

And with that statement, you are trying to set the law of the land. Not everyone's experience is the same as yours, it is absolutely possible that you had a seamless experience while someone else who did everything right is having problems left and right. Because there are logic components on a wifi card, yes there can be faulty cards as well. I could go on and on, but unless you can prove that every single product made by Realtek is free from defects (100% not true btw), you can't just state that and try to write it in stone.

No, it means that 16GB on the Radeon RX 6800 XT will make sure the Radeon will perform better and for much longer period of time than the 10GB GeForce RTX 3080 lol

Why not just have consistent performance from the beginning then? Why would you have to wait years to finally get better performance than its competitor (generalized statement)? There are multiple ways to look at this of course, but from my viewpoint, AMD has a lot of untapped performance on their GPUs because they don't have optimizations from the start. Personally I will never get an AMD GPU as their GPU encoder is straight trash for streaming, but that's a niche thing I guess...

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

From my personal experience across several different Realtek and Intel LAN adapters, Intel has had higher performance, and usually does not break with a driver update. Realtek on the other hand, has worse performance at best. Sure you could say that maybe it's just my network setup that's "built different", but I have also been to other friends' houses and helped them with their PC setups too; it's not just my setup, Intel's LAN adapters are just better because they have are always downloadable from Intel's website, whereas with Realtek adapters, usually you are supposed to use the one that is on your motherboard's support page, and I believe this is where the issue stems from. Since you always have customized drivers from the motherboard manufacturers, every manufacturer is making custom driver changes, that increases the variability of successful operation with all Realtek adapters. Not to mention Intel's LAN adapters have much more [useful] settings than Realtek.

Now back on topic, I have no experience with MediaTek, and I have not heard of that company prior to reading this article. RANT: I mean AMD really could just use Intel's LAN adapters and not be stubborn about it but, okay I guess they want to do their best to ensure competition even if it means the consumers will have a shit experience, as was the case with the infamous USB dropout on Ryzen, and I bet you they even will attempt to deny all allegations of LAN problems at the beginning of the launch.


Have you installed the from the motherboard manufacturer? Or from Intel? Also check your wifi card's antenna connections (internal and external), even a loose connection will cause problems, and in most cases it's a loose connection on the internal side.


And with that statement, you are trying to set the law of the land. Not everyone's experience is the same as yours, it is absolutely possible that you had a seamless experience while someone else who did everything right is having problems left and right. Because there are logic components on a wifi card, yes there can be faulty cards as well. I could go on and on, but unless you can prove that every single product made by Realtek is free from defects (100% not true btw), you can't just state that and try to write it in stone.


Why not just have consistent performance from the beginning then? Why would you have to wait years to finally get better performance than its competitor (generalized statement)? There are multiple ways to look at this of course, but from my viewpoint, AMD has a lot of untapped performance on their GPUs because they don't have optimizations from the start. Personally I will never get an AMD GPU as their GPU encoder is straight trash for streaming, but that's a niche thing I guess...

Mediatek is a chinese company most well known for making the chips you find in dirt cheap tablets and phones, like the sub $100 stuff, and is also well known for abandoning product drivers within 1-2 years. Once its on the shelf they move on.

I wouldnt touch a mediatek product.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

I wouldnt touch a mediatek product.

Me neither. The phones with mediatek in are usually shit.

 

[TheLostSwede]

From my personal experience across several different Realtek and Intel LAN adapters, Intel has had higher performance, and usually does not break with a driver update. Realtek on the other hand, has worse performance at best. Sure you could say that maybe it's just my network setup that's "built different", but I have also been to other friends' houses and helped them with their PC setups too; it's not just my setup, Intel's LAN adapters are just better because they have are always downloadable from Intel's website, whereas with Realtek adapters, usually you are supposed to use the one that is on your motherboard's support page, and I believe this is where the issue stems from. Since you always have customized drivers from the motherboard manufacturers, every manufacturer is making custom driver changes, that increases the variability of successful operation with all Realtek adapters. Not to mention Intel's LAN adapters have much more [useful] settings than Realtek.

Now back on topic, I have no experience with MediaTek, and I have not heard of that company prior to reading this article. RANT: I mean AMD really could just use Intel's LAN adapters and not be stubborn about it but, okay I guess they want to do their best to ensure competition even if it means the consumers will have a shit experience, as was the case with the infamous USB dropout on Ryzen, and I bet you they even will attempt to deny all allegations of LAN problems at the beginning of the launch.


Have you installed the from the motherboard manufacturer? Or from Intel? Also check your wifi card's antenna connections (internal and external), even a loose connection will cause problems, and in most cases it's a loose connection on the internal side.


And with that statement, you are trying to set the law of the land. Not everyone's experience is the same as yours, it is absolutely possible that you had a seamless experience while someone else who did everything right is having problems left and right. Because there are logic components on a wifi card, yes there can be faulty cards as well. I could go on and on, but unless you can prove that every single product made by Realtek is free from defects (100% not true btw), you can't just state that and try to write it in stone.


Why not just have consistent performance from the beginning then? Why would you have to wait years to finally get better performance than its competitor (generalized statement)? There are multiple ways to look at this of course, but from my viewpoint, AMD has a lot of untapped performance on their GPUs because they don't have optimizations from the start. Personally I will never get an AMD GPU as their GPU encoder is straight trash for streaming, but that's a niche thing I guess...

And your expertise in this matter is?
I never said Realtek was the best out there, but your opinion here doesn't count for much if you've never heard of Mediatek.

Also, Realtek offer up to date LAN drivers for Windows on it's website, but I guess you never bothered to look?

Best of all, if you don't like what's going on, you can still stick to Intel, as no-one is forcing you to buy any of this.

 

[Tomorrow]

Yeah, nice work there AMD. It would actually put me off buying a board with cheap crap components with awful drivers.

Anyone still having fun waiting for working drivers for the Realtek 2.5GB LAN?

Intel LAN/WLAN/BT are the gold standard for both hardware and software.

I must be supremely lucky then to have one of the worlds rarest Realtek 2,5G LAN on my X570 Aorus Master (v1.0) that has no problems.
As opposed to Intel's 1G LAN that has had DPC latency issues with every new driver or AX200 BT that is unable to detect my S10e. Yeah. Gold standard my ass.

Sorry, but the constantly disconnecting Realtek 2.5GB LAN chip in my Ryzen Asus motherboard would like to heavily disagree with you. It would also like to tell you that if you think this is a one-off problem, with a one-off person who maybe (in your eyes) does not know how to build a computer and install it, is somehow responsible for the problem, then a few thousand more would like to add their little silicon voices to the choir via google search.

I also hear stories about their audio drivers and software being so bad, that Realtek support tells people to use the standard Microsoft driver...

Clearly a motherboard speific problem. Im using their audio drivers that are miles better than Creatve stuff for their expensive soundcards.

Happens on all boards that used this particular chip. Google search backs this up.

No it does not.

Mediatek makes decent chipsets for routers. The only job here - not screw up with drivers.

Mediatek makes the hardware and AMD will provide the drivers.

have realtek added basic features like interrupt moderation to their 2.5 gbit nics?

all my realtek lans still dont have the feature

See the attachment. It's there along with host of other features.

 

[R-T-B]

I could go on, but I think I have proved my point.

I only know my addin card works fine. Wasn't denying your point beyond that. Maybe the mobos use some differnt realtek chip. *shrugs*

 

[ncrs]

Maybe the mobos use some differnt realtek chip. *shrugs*

There are at least 3 distinct 2.5Gbit/s Realtek chip variants with 2 separate firmware blobs supported by the mainline Linux driver.

 

[TheLostSwede]

There are at least 3 distinct 2.5Gbit/s Realtek chip variants with 2 separate firmware blobs supported by the mainline Linux driver.

They have at least two PHYs, two PCIe options and three USB 3.x options, which would explain that.

 

[Tomorrow]

Mine is RTL8125AG REV_01. No problems. Using driver version 10.50.511.2021

 

[Easo]

Intel is de facto standard in networking. I am not entirely sure this is a good idea.

 

[ncrs]

Intel is de facto standard in networking. I am not entirely sure this is a good idea.

It's not as bad, at least not with 25/40/100+GBit/s. I've seen more (NVIDIA) Mellanox and Broadcom than Intel in those products. But again, just my anecdotal experience

 

[Valantar]

I really don't care at this point. I used to own a 5700 XT, had lots of issues, saw many people have issues => AMD bad. What's worse is nobody actually tried to help. They all made it seem like I was imagining things or that something else in my PC was broken so they recommended every trick in the book despite me telling them that my system is fine. They kept insisting that there's no way AMD did something wrong.

Who did? That's pretty weird as a response, but then these issues have AFAIK never been fixed or even had their source conclusively identified, which points towards a hardware or firmware bug. The problem was that it seemed to be extremely selective in which other hardware it had to be combined with to appear at all, which made even replicating the errors really hard. I think AMD messed up pretty substantially with that particular GPU, but going from that to "AMD bad" is just poor reasoning still.

 

[GoldenX]

Good, better Joy-Con pairing .
For those that don't know, if you pair Nintendo controllers via Bluetooth on an Intel WiFi+BT chipset, the pairing is weak, you need to disable WiFi to get it working fine. Generic USB dongles don't face this.

 

[ShurikN]

Have you installed the from the motherboard manufacturer? Or from Intel? Also check your wifi card's antenna connections (internal and external), even a loose connection will cause problems, and in most cases it's a loose connection on the internal side.

Yes. I have tried almost everything. Drivers from Intel, drivers from gigabyte. Oldest drivers, newest drivers, drivers in between. Two different ISPs in two different homes (both work fine on a wired conn). Tried changing the protocol from AX to AC, didn't help. Tried a bunch of "fixes" from the official Intel community support, and nothing. And a lot of people are having this same issue so it's not the antenna connectors. Gave up after a couple of months, used cable ever since.

 

[Jism]

Intel has been pretty reliable when it comes to networking. I hope this RZ660 will be just as good.

Stop.

I had a fairly expensive board (X470-F) on which the Intel onboard NIC just blew out. It started "erratic" meaning it dropped packets and what more all along, at some point the NIC did'nt function anymore. It was even gone from within the BIOS. And weeks later the complete board died. Now a 570 with a Realtek and zero to none issues for more then a year.

I was'nt the only one appearantly. More people with Intel NIC's had these issues. There is or was a faulty batch along the way. Same as with these Atom CPU's that would die one day without any notification.

 

[ARF]

Intel is de facto standard in networking. I am not entirely sure this is a good idea.

If we want progress, then we must abandon the old standards and move on to some new and better

Intel is corruption, greed and bribes - there should be sanctions against their bad business practices.

 

[Zubasa]

Intel has been pretty reliable when it comes to networking. I hope this RZ660 will be just as good.

Tell that to the dreadful i225-V 2.5G Ethernet that I am constantly struggling with.
It sometimes refuse to start on a reboot and requires a power cycle.
I have the (3) revision that is supposedly "fixed".

Yeah, nice work there AMD. It would actually put me off buying a board with cheap crap components with awful drivers.

Anyone still having fun waiting for working drivers for the Realtek 2.5GB LAN?

Intel LAN/WLAN/BT are the gold standard for both hardware and software.

Apperently not so gold after all.

 

[kanecvr]

This is in no way a good move... My old Asus FX506IV came with a Realtek wifi card and it had connectivity issues... It would disconnect randomly from my vodafone provided cisco router, as well as my TP-Link router. It was worse with the TP-Link, since I sometimes had to reboot the laptop to get wifi back. In some cases the card would disappear from device manager altogether or show up with an exclamation mark. I've since replaced it with an Intel AC9260 wifi card and had no issues ever since.

My current G713QY has a Mediatek wifi card, and while speed and wifi signal seem to be superior to intel cards I've used so far, it's slow to pick up wifi networks and can take up to 5 minutes after boot to register a network although it says it's connected (connected, no internet).

 

[TheLostSwede]

This is in no way a good move... My old Asus FX506IV came with a Realtek wifi card and it had connectivity issues... It would disconnect randomly from my vodafone provided cisco router, as well as my TP-Link router. It was worse with the TP-Link, since I sometimes had to reboot the laptop to get wifi back. In some cases the card would disappear from device manager altogether or show up with an exclamation mark. I've since replaced it with an Intel AC9260 wifi card and had no issues ever since.

My current G713QY has a Mediatek wifi card, and while speed and wifi signal seem to be superior to intel cards I've used so far, it's slow to pick up wifi networks and can take up to 5 minutes after boot to register a network although it says it's connected (connected, no internet).

With WiFi it actually matters a lot in terms of what chip there is in the router too.
Intel has a known bug in some of its cards that prevent proper operation with some Broadcom solutions and it has never been fixed.

It's possible that Realtek has some similar issues with whatever chips were in your routers. I've used crappy WiFi products from Realtek and I've used ones that work great and the same applies to MTK, Intel, Broadcom and Qualcomm. Asus made a Broadcom based PCIe card that never worked properly, so they simply made a new version and dropped support for the old one. Qualcomm screwed up their first 802.11ac router chipset, told customers that they were SOL, made a new revision and moved on. Yet the old revision ended up in at least three or four products that were on sale.

On top of this, all the WiFi chip makers implement their own "enhancements" to their products that work great if all your products use their chips, but sometimes causes issues in a mixed environment, something that's much more common.

My router and my two APs are all based on Qualcomm hardware and I have zero issues "roaming" between them, something that I know isn't always the case if you have a mix of different solutions. The big problem here is that it's not easy to know what hardware is in your device, which means most consumers just buys whatever they like/can afford and call it a day. Then when there's issues, they blame the manufacturer of the device.

Yes, WiFi should be interoperable between brands, but it's far from perfect.

 

[T_Zel]

I really don't care at this point. I used to own a 5700 XT, had lots of issues, saw many people have issues => AMD bad. What's worse is nobody actually tried to help. They all made it seem like I was imagining things or that something else in my PC was broken so they recommended every trick in the book despite me telling them that my system is fine. They kept insisting that there's no way AMD did something wrong.

Anecdotally, my 5700 XT issues were entirely caused by the Zen 2 BIOS update for B450 boards (and other chipsets like X470 were also affected). The first BIOS version to support the then-new Ryzen 3000 series accidentally unlocked PCIe 4.0 on the board, which the 5700 XT defaulted to utilising. Of course, PCIe 4.0 wasn't stable on B450 so I would get frequent game crashes and BSODs.

Disabling auto PCIe in the BIOS and manually setting 3.0 solved all my problems, and later BIOS revisions removed PCIe 4.0 as an option. I'm certainly not the only person to have encountered this either, as Steve from Hardware Unboxed has also mentioned fixing a friend's 5700 XT issues by manually setting PCIe 3.0 in the BIOS. But I imagine there are an awful lot of people out there who didn't update their BIOS after the first Zen 2 version and never worked out the PCIe issue. I think of this every time I hear a story about someone RMAing 5 "faulty" 5700 XTs before switching to an Nvidia card.

 

[Deleted member 215115]

Anecdotally, my 5700 XT issues were entirely caused by the Zen 2 BIOS update for B450 boards (and other chipsets like X470 were also affected). The first BIOS version to support the then-new Ryzen 3000 series accidentally unlocked PCIe 4.0 on the board, which the 5700 XT defaulted to utilising. Of course, PCIe 4.0 wasn't stable on B450 so I would get frequent game crashes and BSODs.

Disabling auto PCIe in the BIOS and manually setting 3.0 solved all my problems, and later BIOS revisions removed PCIe 4.0 as an option. I'm certainly not the only person to have encountered this either, as Steve from Hardware Unboxed has also mentioned fixing a friend's 5700 XT issues by manually setting PCIe 3.0 in the BIOS. But I imagine there are an awful lot of people out there who didn't update their BIOS after the first Zen 2 version and never worked out the PCIe issue. I think of this every time I hear a story about someone RMAing 5 "faulty" 5700 XTs before switching to an Nvidia card.

I tried everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. I wish it was that easy to fix...

 

[fb020997]

just my experience:
I switched from an Intel I211-V to a Realtek Gigabit when upgrading my rig from an Asus Prime X470 to a B550, and there’s ZERO difference between the two.
But, looking at earlier posts, I’m glad I only have a Gigabit NIC

 

[chrcoluk]

It's possible that Realtek has some similar issues with whatever chips were in your routers. I've used crappy WiFi products from Realtek and I've used ones that work great and the same applies to MTK, Intel, Broadcom and Qualcomm. Asus made a Broadcom based PCIe card that never worked properly, so they simply made a new version and dropped support for the old one. Qualcomm screwed up their first 802.11ac router chipset, told customers that they were SOL, made a new revision and moved on. Yet the old revision ended up in at least three or four products that were on sale.

Yeah not good practice, that's effectively what happened to me with my MX500 SSD, was just told tough luck, even though the newer revision probably has it fixed.

So not surprised from both Qualcomm and Asus there, its immoral but seems to be standard practice as no one likes doing product recalls or even attempted software fixes.

Luckily I have had few issues with wifi on client devices, replacing a WAP is far cheaper than client devices, consider e.g. laptops often have whitelisted wifi devices so hard to upgrade unless via wifi dongle, and replacing a phone is another example of a expensive upgrade. My Asus RTAC68 was a a bit problematic but thankfully only £20 to replace it with something that works.