PC Peripherals Unusual events with my PCIe devices (Realtek WiFi card)

RadarHz

Disciple
I'm sat at my PC playing games etc, when I get a BSOD with the stop code: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION. Do not recall which driver failed.
- The system was completely frozen and I had to turn the PSU off to reset it. Powered back on, now it doesn't POST. I reset CMOS, still no POST.
- Then I reseat all my PCIe devices (GPU and WiFi card), reseat my RAM sticks, reset CMOS again. Now it boots to BIOS with the reset message.
- I get into Windows and run an SFC scannow, and the system freezes again. I reset, and I go back into the no POST situation. Reseating PCIe devices and clearing CMOS fixes it.
- Now I get into Windows and rapidly reboot into Safe Mode. No freezes. I open Event Viewer and there are Kernel-Power critical events. Nothing else descriptive. I back up my files on an external drive
- One last shot into Windows, and it freezes within a minute of login. Reseating PCIe devices and clearing CMOS fixes it.
- I decide to reinstall Windows, and the installation goes smoothly. I can stay inside Windows without freezing.

After this, everything has been going smoothly. No crashes. I have enabled my XMP profile and PBO2 curve without any issues. A new problem has emerged: my WiFi.

- Every hour or so, my WiFi will randomly disconnect and not reconnect back again/not display existing networks.
- Restarting does not fix it. Uninstalling driver from Device Manager and letting it reinstall does not fix it. Network reset does not fix it.
In this state, even my USB WiFi adapter shows the same problem.

What does fix it across the board, is pulling out my WiFi card, and slotting it back in. Like nothing ever went wrong.

I suspect that it's my motherboard acting up, or my WiFi card. Anything else that could be faulty?
Hardware:
- R5 5600x
- Gigabyte B450M S2H
- Crucial Ballistix RGB 8GBx2 3200MHz
- CM MWE v2 450W 80+ br
- Nvidia T600
- TP-Link AC600 (Realtek 8821CE) Link

Incidentally, it happened literally as I was typing this out. I took the PCIe card out for now, and using my USB adapter (N150 pepega) with 2.4GHz mobile hotspot as it can't detect the 5GHz network. This WiFi card is a new purchase, installed yesterday. Motherboard has been with me for a couple of years, gone through multiple Ryzen upgrades and multiple GPUs. BIOS updated to latest non-beta version.
 
That's the first-time guess for me, but I am not certain if the faulty card had/could have such a bug/fault which caused a bad driver contamination in the first place. 8821CEs have a notoriety for being unreliable.
 
That's the first-time guess for me, but I am not certain if the faulty card had/could have such a bug/fault which caused a bad driver contamination in the first place. 8821CEs have a notoriety for being unreliable.

Some of the AC600 and AC1200 are definitely unreliable. Heck even some Intel LAN port on premium motherboards are unreliable these days.
 
Go to Device Manager > Network Adapters, select Wifi adapter, then Power Management tab, clear the check box to "Allow the computer to turn off the device to save energy." Then on the Advanced tab disable any energy-saving options.

Dont rely on windows update drivers as they can be buggy at times, download the latest ones or a bit older from Tplinks site.

Try these..



 
I had already disabled that before I wrote the original post. Also, none of these links are relevant to my device, as they are all USB adapters whereas I have a problem with the PCIe card model.

In any case, I got it refunded and went for AC1300. Doesn't drop connection every hour so that's a massive improvement already.
 
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