Drivers and settings for Realtek RTL8812AU wifi adapter?

Nerva

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 12, 2008
Messages
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I've purchased several Alfa AWUS036AC 802.11ac dual-band wifi USB adapters for use with three Windows 7 computers I have, and I am looking to get better performance out of them. I am connecting them to a TRENDnet TEW-812DRU AC1750 dual-band wireless router. What perplexes me is the variability of signal strength I'm seeing from hour-to-hour and day-to-day, and the fact that rebooting the computer almost always seems to improve the connection. I've also seen the "rtwlanu.sys" cause a BSoD, which makes me suspect the drivers are buggy.

For starters, I'm having a hard time finding the most up-to-date drivers for the RTL8812AU chipset used by the AWUS036AC -- strangely, there seems to be no listing for it on Realtek's website. The Alfa website lists only one Windows 7 driver, and it is six months old -- messages to their tech support have gone unanswered. If anyone could point me to the latest driver for download, it would be appreciated.

Second, I am curious if there are any settings in the Device Manager entry for the adapter that would improve performance? I would am running them them in the 5GHz 802.11ac mode, both for better speed and to free up the 2.4GHz band for all the other devices that only support that band and aren't as performance-sensitive.
 
I have noticed with motherboards that use Realtek chipsets, that a given motherboard vendor seldom keeps up with the Realtek driver releases, and the best solution is to go to Realtek's website directly for the best/latest drivers -- all the vendors do is slap their own brand-name on the driver installer. However, Realtek seems to make no mention of their RTL8812AU chipset on their own website, which continues to baffle me.
 
The EDIMAX EW-7822UAC driver offers the latest windows drivers that I have found. Below is the driverversion that I have pulled from the included netrtwlanu.inf file.

Code:
DriverVer = 07/30/2014,1026.13.0625.2014

I downloaded EW-7822UAC_Windows_driver_v1.0.2.4.zip from here.

And here is a wikidevi query that lists other adapters that are also using this same chipset.

Odd that Realtek does not have the latest drivers listed on their website.
 
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I installed the all in one package from the Netis installer. It had the date on their website, and gives me the "Realtek 11n USB Wireless Lan Utility" on Windows 8.1 x64.

It appears to have better signal strength, I think I'm seeing 4/5 bars in my tray icon, where I previously saw 3/5. However I have no numerical values to validate this, so YMMV.

Perhaps my antenna extension cables will actually improve signal strength now. Previously they degraded my signal strength.
 
The 1026.13 version is only for Win8.1. I'm running Windows 7 x64, and the drivers in the zip for that are only version 1024.9. I tried using Device Manager to "Update Driver" and pointed it to the 8.1x64 folder, but it tells me my driver is up-to-date. Manually right-clicking "install" gave an error that it can't be installed that way.
 
Weird -- the Netis installer has version 1026.13 for Win7 x64. I'm giving it a try now.
 
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