Razer Blade 14inch Lag Spike Problems

Hey everyone! not sure if there is a certain form i should follow, but i just bought a Razer Blade and while playing League of Legends, TF2, or any of my Steam Games I will get GIANT lag spikes. They occur probably every 10-15 seconds and i lose control of the game for 4 seconds of so each time, its really frustrating. I've noticed it on my home router as well as my campus network. Is it the Network card or drivers? I'll post any diagnostic results you need.

 

If you have the Killer 1202 WiFi, go to device manager -> network adapters -> wifi properties -> advanced -> background scan set to OFF.

See if lag spikes still happen.

 

When i go to advanced there are 7 options: 802.11b preamble, adHoc 11n, dynamic MIMO power save, network address, receive buffers, scan valid interval, and transmit buffers. which one do i alter and to what value do i alter it to?

 

Well, I just looked up the settings for Killer 1103, but it seems not all settings are present in the Killer 1202 such as background scan. Background scan are one of the culprits for lag spikes since even though you're connected, the adapter still scans for nearby networks, resulting to recurring lag spikes.

Anyways, the default settings are fine I think. Are you connected to the 5 GHz band? The 2.4 GHz band have a lot of co-channel interference + 2.4 GHz interference from many devices such as Bluetooth, wireless cameras, usb 3.0, microwaves, etc which causes severe lag spikes or even disconnections.

 

I had similar issues with my RB14 and Killer 1202. As posted previously, the spikes are most likely caused by the background scan, and I found no way to disable this so-called feature. I am still amazed why a company that produces gaming equipment would add such a feature that can completely ruin your gaming experience, without providing an option to disable it.

I can confirm that is not the router's fault, as my second PC has an older Broadcom wifi card that works flawlessly.

However, here's what I did to ameliorate the situation:
- update the Killer driver to the latest version (1.1.38.1281)
- set receive buffers to 512
- set scan valid interval to 120
- set transmit buffers to 512

Initially, the background scan would introduce about 3 seconds of ~300ms spikes. After performing the above steps, the duration reduced to about 1 second, and the latency spike is about 150ms.

I also tried to replace the Killer with Intel 7260AC, but unfortunaly some of those cards have issues as well. In my case, after disabling the background scan on the Intel (you can do this by using regedit to add the ScanWhenAssociated value to your adapter and set it to 0), the random spikes disappeared for a while. But after two days, I had a major problem: the latency to the local router was all over the chart, random numbers ranging from 1ms to 3000ms, a lot of timeouts and very poor overall connection. This issue seemed to appear randomly and it wouldn't go away without a restart. It seems to be a common issue with some of the Intel cards ( https://communities.intel.com/thread/47983).

In the end, I switched back to Killer and I am also waiting for a solution to this issue.

 

Thanks for the reply aAex! I'll go ahead with the changes you've posted, hopefully they will help. hopefully they update the drivers soon

 

Does the Killer software manage the wifi connections or windows?

 

I think the Killer network manager prioritizes which programs get the most bandwidth according to set priority level. It usually sets games automatically to 1 (Highest) but maybe OP has outdated drivers. Killer became a pain for me with frequent BSODs from its drivers ._. until recent updates and it's been smooth sailing since.