TP-Link 10GB PCIe Network Card (TX401)-PCIe to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter,Supports Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, Servers 2019/2016/2012 R2, and Linux, Including a CAT6A Cable

My wife needed some where to backup her phone pictures, so I decided to pull out her old Windows 7 machine, which restricted my choice of wifi cards. This card seemed to fit my requirements, and for $20, price was not an issue.I got the card, installed it in the machine, powered it up, and put the driver disc in the optical drive. The drivers loaded right up, rebooted, and everything was functional without issue.Easy installation, proper functionality, and good wifi speed for this older hardware. This card is an awesome value for the very low price.

For people who don't want to spend unnecessary amounts of money on a Wifi card for their desktop build, this is a very good option. On my Windows 11 build, it came right up without needing additional drivers; it seems that Windows 11 has support for the chipset in question included in a standard install.If you are a Linux user, you'll want to know in advance that the chipset in this adapter is the Realtek RTL8812AE. Check your distro for driver support using the chipset, rather than the TP-Link model number, to find the right driver. TP-Link does not directly offer its own Linux driver.I found no problems with build quality or the included antennas. Everything fit without having to force or slightly bend backplates, etc., and if you prefer to use a different pair of antennas just order a pair of the very common RP-SMA Male Wifi antennas that almost all Wifi cards use these days. That said, the included antennas do the job nicely, getting almost as good throughput from opposite my house though multiple walls as when in the same room as the WiFi router. You probably won't need to get other antennas.Please keep in mind that this card does WiFi, but NOT Bluetooth. If you need that, either a more expensive dual-purpose card or getting an inexpensive USB Bluetooth dongel (no reason you should spend more than 6 or 7 dollars on such a dongel) would fit the bill.

Getting around 350 mbps. I installed the driver from their website initially but later on a clean Windows 11 install it looked like native Windows drivers may support it. Recommended.

I was able to install this and have it up and running on a Linux box with no additional driver work needed. I am running Ubuntu 16.04. The driver it loaded is rtl8821ae. I'm sure I could get it going with some proprietary drivers, but at the moment the performance is more than sufficient. Any limitations I'm hitting are most likely with my router right now rather than this card. One thing to note, ANYTHING can affect your Wifi connection. Walls, equipment running nearby, people walking in the vicinity, being too far away from or too close to the access point and many other factors can contribute to poor signal or poor performance. I see no reason that this card cannot meet the vast majority of use cases for the vast majority of users with a properly setup network.(Advanced user and nerd info)I was also able to test out this card in hotspot (AP) mode. I could connect a mobile device to it and ping the host. Here is list of supported interfaces on this card:Supported interface modes:* IBSS* managed* AP* AP/VLAN* monitor* mesh point* P2P-client* P2P-GO

It's a good card, but you should install the latest drivers after receiving it, especially if you see random disconnects. The new drivers might just fix it.Details:I was initially very disappointed with this card. I purchased two of them, and both of them would frequently disconnect while running on windows 10 machines. Neither machine had problems when using their onboard LAN. Both machines were fine when transferring large files to each other's shared drives at 10gb speed, but internet speed tests would make them crash, even though our modem can only do 1gb.I assumed that the cards were both dead on arrival, possibly due to overheating. I was wrong.After I contacted TP Link, they put me in touch with a person who identified themselves as a Senior Engineer, and asked me to install a "Beta Driver".That made the connection much more stable. With the new driver, it would only disconnect very rarely when downloading a game from steam, but other use cases, like speed tests, were now stable.A few more months have passed, and now it no longer disconnects, even when downloading games from steam. I don't know if Microsoft patched something, or Steam patched something, but the problems have stopped with now further driver changes.The beta driver that helped me was: beta/2022/202211/20221102/win11.zipThe newest windows driver on their site is: TX401(UN)_V1_221202_WindowsSo it looks like they may have now released that beta driver, or an even newer version, so you can get it without chatting with support for an hour.One final note:I read elsewhere that disabling 'Recv Segment Coalescing' for IPv4 and IPv6 could make cards that use a Marvel Aqtion 10g chip like this one more stable. I don't know if this would help because by the time I learned about it, my card was stable both with this feature on and off, and having it on seems like it might make downloads faster, so I left it on.