I am a hobbyist computer and IT guy. Not professionally trained but I grew up with the technology and have been tinkering with them for years. I am still learning new things and enjoy deeping my understanding. Troubleshooting is often a great journey to discovering new insights.
Shelved in the basement was a desktop pc released in 2018. Ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU, 24GB DDR4 RAM, and an AMD RX580. These days such specs are modest compared to the latest and greatest but still pretty good IMO. If I remember right, it was having some graphical issues probably caused by a hdmi cable or something. It was a long time ago, no idea why such a good PC ended up collecting dust. Oh well, as a silver lining this story is about giving the PC new life.
This week I began tinkering around with local AI. LLama 3.1 8b just got released; I have been having lots of fun learning with it on the laptop. Sadly my poor old thinkpad is just not meant for that kind of work. It was sloow to generate text and process information…
So remembering the 6 core desktop in the basement, the time felt right to dust off the PC and get it to do some useful computing. Unfortunately while the specs are powerful, the things wifi never worked right for some reason. I never thought much about it since the PC was situated next to a router with Ethernet as a connection. Now it needs to live significantly further away and rely solely on wifi for big file transfers.
On an internet connection where my laptops right next to it were getting hundreds of mbps download, the pc was getting 10mbps. Ive had metal cased desktops before and none of them were this bad connection wise. Something was seriously wrong bottlenecking an otherwise great setup. So at first I figured it must have been a linux driver issue or some kind of software bug. Spent hours installing the right drivers for my specific wifi card and troubleshooting via terminal. Didn’t help any.
Then I figured maybe the card was bust and researched new wifi cards. I always thought wifi cards were little chips and antennas built into the motherboard. Not the case with this computer.
My first important discovery was that this computer had a huge wifi card mounted just underneath graphics card taking up its own slot in the back. This makes sense, if you want to upgrade to the newest wifi frequency in 10-20 years just pop a updated card into the slot.
My second important discovery was realizing the beastly wifi card had two little brass bits connecting out behind the PC. Threaded bits. Hey I know these, they are male coaxial bits… For an… antenna… facepalm
The realization hit me like a club. Oh… OH. YOOO IT NEEDS ANTENNAS, DUDE. I had been using a radio technology with either no antenna or an inbuilt one so awful it might as well be malfunctioning.
I felt like an idiot, have seen the back of that PC many times but for some reason just never noticed or thought about the coaxial bits and what they could be for. Oh well lets just order some cheap sticks and hope it helps.
So I with the cheap set of antennas in hand, I screwed them on. Honestly expected it not to do anything because its never that simple. Fired up speedtest before and after installation. Before antennas was 10mbps up and down After installing the antennas >200mbps down and >100mpbs up. Yeeeeah looks like that took care of the issue right away.
In the future ill look on the back of my big desktops and see if they could be easily upgraded with a set of antennas. The more you know!
Even if it’s built into the motherboard, a desktop pc will generally have antennas. Metal cases block signals, so they need to get out. Your laptop is designed to let the wifi out, your desktop not so much.
You’re not alone. I spent $3500 on a new system for consulting work and was having all sorts of issues with Bluetooth, to the point where I used wired headphones for a week for countless meetings.
Finally started cleaning up the boxes and packaging (haha) and…lo and behold a packet with antennas in it???
Screwed them on and immediately those issues went away 🤦♂️
Brilliant story coz its such a good example of diagnostic troubles.
I used to train technicians on phone repair and always told em to check the simplest most obvious things first.
I can not tell you how many times I wished I’d taken my own advice and had an experience similar to your story. Gotta laugh at yourself!
You: “Have you tried restarting it?”
Them: “No way, that’d never work!”
You: “Humor me.”
Them: “…”
You: “Well…?”
The other person hangs up.
I had no end of trouble with Bluetooth until I screwed in the wifi antennas. I use Ethernet so it never occurred to me before then.
Wow thanks for sharing! Thats useful to know.
I often feel like im in this weird in between with tech. Like im pretty good technology and a power user but at the same time, theres tons of small things I forget or overlook and i end up feeling like an idiot lol.
This was a great read to help me feel like im not alone in that. I think anyone whos ever built a pc can relate to “Oh yea it helps if you turn on the power supply” or “damnit, i plugged the monitor into the motherboard ports instead of the GPU”
I think it’s important to remeber that you’re only human. Bound to overlook something. I sure dont remember that as often as i should.
“damnit, i plugged the monitor into the motherboard ports instead of the GPU”
I didn’t come to the comments to be roasted like this, but here I am
I too noticed that high end wifi motherboards all come with a massive antenna and i just have to wonder why?
I think laptops do a trick with the antenna running up the monitor but those antennas are bigger than a phone.
If you open the laptops, you’ll find some small cables that snap onto the wi-gi card and connect to antenbae mounted in thr chassis.
Desktop mainboards don’t fo that because arbitrary cases might not have a built-in antenna.
ISTR an early name-brand desktop with wi-fi did have an inyernal antenna because you knew that mainboard was paired with that specific case with a point to snap the antenna into.
TIl those blackwhite cables are literally just antenna
So what would be a good progression is if we start building antennas within cases, similarly to how they traditionally also provide the internal speaker.
Your network connection should not a feature of your case.
Bad idea for a few reasons. It’s adding a feature and cost to the case which isn’t required for most uses, and results in less flexibility. It relies on the connectioms being the same, as well as all WiFi cards changing their design to support the new connection method, and you still end up with an internal antenna that you can’t easily move or replace.
Sometimes its the silliest of things - I’m glad it ended up being an easy fix!
Have fun with the AI stuff, I’ve been having a fun time playing around with it locally as well.
I bet in the motherboard manual there’s a bit that says to install the antennas lol
Always good to get some solid closure for a technical problem like this!
