Troubleshoot WiFi card works in PCIe x 16 slot but not PCIe x1slot

[jetman]

I have a PC that originally came with no WiFi card.

I installed a "TP-Link Archer T5E" WiFi card which is supposed to fit into the PCIe x1 slot. However, it does not appear to work in this slot and is not recognised in Windows. Yet when I put the card into the PCIe x16 slot it does work, even though the slot seems very big in comparison to the WiFi card !

Does anyone know why this is ? Although my WiFi works, it would be good to keep the PCIe x16 slot free in case I want to install a graphics card.

According to the specifications of the PC I have the following...
1 Half Height PCIe x16
1 Half Height PCIe x1
1 M.2 For storage (22x80mm or 22x30mm)
1 M.2 for wireless (22x30mm)

Below is an image of my motherboard with the DVD drive and SATA hard disk drive removed.
In the top left corner the blue slot is where I have installed the WiFi Card. The card doesn't work in the smaller black slot even though it fits in that perfectly.

Thanks for any comments.

 

[Paul Lee]

Why not just purchase a USB wifi dongle? Do you have any free ports available?

 

[jetman]

That crossed my mind, but I've already purchased the WiFi Card !

 

[Lenny_Fox]

Have you checked bios settings? Try enabling all network related settings (even cabled netwok related settings). For me this once solved the problem in combination with using vendors software. See below

Have you tried the setup software from the vendor when Windows did not recognize it? Long time ago (windows 7) i had a wifi card, which i had to 'start' with vendors software. Once it worked I could choose to use windows. In successive boots it worked fine. Then i decided to remove the vendor's software. Everything kept working until i upgraded to windows 10. Same story card did not work. Installing vendors software solved the problem. Windows10 automatically replaced vendors driver with windows version. After a few days I removed vendor software and card kept working.

 

[XLR8R]

Do you have anything on the M.2 slots? On some boards you can't use some PCIe slots if some specific M.2 slots are populated. It's purely down to bad board design.

 

[Vasudev]

Have you verified if the slot was previously working or not?
Knowing Dell, their BIOS may have a whitelist for allowed cards or devices in PCIe x1 slot.

 

[MacDefender]

On some PCs, certain PCIE slots are shared with other things like M.2 SSDs or even onboard networking. Might be worth looking around your BIOS settings or motherboard manual.

 

[jetman]

Thanks for your comments- much appreciated. I'm investigating all of them.

In the meantime I'll take advantage of Amazon's returns policy to purchase (and then return) another WiFi card to see if that makes any difference !

 

[sepik]

Hello,
Why it has to be PCI-E wifi card, because you can buy a USB wifi "dongle" with an antenna or without it. Its about 10$ or so. By using PCIE wifi card might cause that some SATA ports gets disabled.

Kind regards,
-sepik

 

[XLR8R]

You can usually get one of those high speed USB dongles which work fine for WiFi.

My motherboard actually has integrated WiFi but the USB one always delivers a better transfer speed anyway.