Weird interference problem (WiFi and video card)

[bobolito]

This is a good one! Sorry for the length. I have an ASUS motherboard in my home-built machine. It has regular PCI, PCI-E 1X and 16X slots. I use a D-Link WDA-2320 PCI wireless card and has been working great in the past few months with WPA2 encryption to my D-Link 625 router. I also have an ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 PCI-E 16X card and has been working great as well.

I decided to change to an NVidia 9600 card because I don't want the TV Tuner built-in the ATI anymore since I am getting a satellite TV tuner instead and I don't want to have two tuners in the same machine.

Now here's the problem. As soon as I installed the NVIDIA card my wireless card stopped working. I mean, the wireless card will find the signal and often times will "connect" and get an IP from my router, but when it comes to using the internet there's no data transfer at all! I tried to ping my router and I only got "Request time out" messages in the CMD window. Sometimes I would get a VERY high reply time, like 900ms or 1100ms (normally, I should get reply times about only 1ms) but most of the times it times out. I took out and reseated both cards and I saw some improvement, but still very bad ping times. Yes, my wireless card antenna was securely connected and my signal strength was Excellent the whole time. My laptop sitting right next to me would have no problems at all trying to ping my router, so the router is not the problem here. I started touching and pushing my Nvidia card in the slot while I looked at the ping times and I noticed how the ping times fluctuated from very bad to good depending on the position of the card I guess. Without a screw securing the Nvidia card, I was able to play a bit with it.

The Nvidia card is two slots away from my wireless card so I figured I would separate them more. I have another PCI-E 16 slot in my motherboard, so I tried that and put the wireless card in the PCI slot furthest away from the Nvidia card. Still didn't make a difference! Bad ping times all the time!

So I decided to put my ATI card back in the computer and removed the Nvidia card. Now the wireless card was happy again and ping times were fine around 1ms. I went back to the Nvidia card just to confirm, and once again my ping times were screwed up in the 1000ms+ range or timing out.

Now, here's the interesting part: I took both my Nvidia card and my wireless card and installed both of them on a different computer (a Gateway machine with a Core2 Duo on an Intel motherboard). I was expecting the same problem to happen, but it didn't! The wireless card was happy, ping times were great and the Nvidia card was working fine! I am getting a replacement of the Nvidia card just to see if it makes a difference.

What the hell could be happening here? Why is the Nvidia card causing problems with my wireless card only in my computer but not in another computer?

[glc]

You may want to update the motherboard bios.

[bobolito]

I did....no difference.

[bobolito]

Well, here's the happy ending to my story. After exchanging my NVidia card for another, and also updating the BIOS and upgrading all the motherboard, chipset, NVidia and D-Link drivers to their latest versions and realizing none of these solved the problem, I decided to change my wireless card.

I exchanged my D-Link WDA-2320 PCI wireless card with someone who has a Linksys WMP54G PCI card and problem solved! My D-Link card lives happy in his machine, and his Linksys card is happy with the NVidia card in my computer!

Lesson learned: Some combinations of hardware just don't get along!

[mbossman2]

Originally Posted by bobolito Lesson learned: Some combinations of hardware just don't get along!

and a wise man remembers this lesson.

in the race to provide a competitive price, many companies will take shortcuts and the most common (and expensive) one is interoperability testing and compliance.

[Techboy]

I wished I read this thread prior to purchasing this D-Link PCI card over the weekend... I have an identical hardware setup as you. Thank you for doing through testing on it, I was pulling my hair out last night.

I'll be returning this card as soon as I get a new wireless card during lunch break today!