Got an AMD APU? Internet / LAN slower than it should be? AppEx Accelerator

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I recently set up a friend's FM2 rig, and we were having trouble with his internet on that computer, showing as low as 3.68Mbit/sec down, when hardwired to his router. His internet connection is 80Mbit+ down.

I tried swapping cables, updating Realtek gigE NIC drivers, nothing worked to significantly restore his internet speed on that PC.

I went to the NIC properties, and there was this "AppEx Accelerator" installed, above the MS QoS miniport.

Well, I searched on the internet, and I found an article on WikiPedia referencing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppEx_Networks

Known Problems

AppEx Networks Accelerator is turned on by default for AMD A4, A6, A8, and A10 computers running Windows 7. It has been found that the program causes a SIGNIFICANT decrease in speed to the overall internet connection. After diagnosing why internet was suddenly 1/10th of the speed, it was found that the AppEx Network Accelerator needed to be disabled in the Network Connection Properties in Microsoft Windows.

That was my problem exactly.

I don't know how it got installed into Win7 64-bit, other than I suspect it may have been bundled with AMD's APU drivers for the A6-5400K that was in my friend's machine.

It seems a bit spyware-ish to me. I don't like it, and it seems to provide no benefit that I can see, so I recommend disabling or removing it.

When I disabled it, my speedtests went from 3.6-14 Mbit/sec up to 87Mbit/sec.

 

[UaVaj]

not surprised at all.

in giving amd the benefit of the doubt.

how about testing the network again. this time right after fresh install of win7 and before the apu driver. this will isolate/confirm the culprit.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That PC is now at someone else's place, and I'm not going to re-install Windows just to test, but I'm building a few more FM2 PCs soon, so I'll check it out and report back then.

 

[Phaetos]

I can confirm this. It comes with the Catalyst driver setup for the APU's. It had previously gotten installed on my PC and when I investigated why my speeds dropped horrendously, I found that crap installed. I had forgotten about this shit until I saw this thread and remembered that I had updated to the new Catalyst driver package 2 days ago. I just checked and it was installed again.

Why AMD, why?

Edited for redundancy in my sentence

 

[Maximilian]

Poor showing from AMD bundling crapware with their drivers.

I was ticked when catalyst 14.4 installed some fooking AMD gaming app, three things struck me about it:

- It didn't have a close button...
- In programs & features it was called "raptr" which differs significantly to what the program was called in the toolbar at the top
- When uninstalling it, I was taken to a page to fill out a survey about why I was uninstalling it

Very poor show! Was kinda hoping that was a one-off.

EDIT: Had a look and ive figured out how this junk gets installed:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=454&threadid=171765

If you get through the "blah blah ur an idot l2install software" in that thread the issue is junkware is included by default when using "express install". So now you have to click "custom install" and uncheck the crap you don't want. Thats possibly how the AppEx Accelerator ended up there as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

EDIT: Had a look and ive figured out how this junk gets installed:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=454&threadid=171765

If you get through the "blah blah ur an idot l2install software" in that thread the issue is junkware is included by default when using "express install". So now you have to click "custom install" and uncheck the crap you don't want. Thats possibly how the AppEx Accelerator ended up there as well.

Except, I ALWAYS check "Custom Install" on anything I'm installing. I was able to uncheck "AMD Gaming Experience" or whatever they call it. (Which is a good thing, on prior drivers, it wasn't even un-selectable during a Custom install.) However, I don't recall seeing anything for "AppEx Accelerator" to not install.

This is pretty insidious, AMD.

 

[sptian]

I have built a rig fairly recently, the main HW is an msi itx fm2+ motherboard, and an amd 7850k cpu.​

I was making some changes to my router and realized download was about 25% of upload, when it should be about twice the speed of upload. It have been great for at least a year so of course i suspected the router to be the cause of the slowdown.​

Made a test with an old laptop and instantly got full speed so the problem had to be somewhere else.​

I did some troubleshooting (first i suspected win 8.1) and stumbled upon the "AppEx Network Accelerator" under the network interface settings, tried to disengage it and voila! speed back to normal. So i can confirm that this -whatever its supposed to do- slowed my windows networking alot.​

Im sure i didnt install this on purpose so it must have been in some package, makes me wonder why this kind of crap software is bundled ​

 

[Madpacket]

Rule of thumb with PC software..

If the software contains the word "Accelerator" in it, Burn it with Fire!

 

[Cerb]

Poor showing from AMD bundling crapware with their drivers.

I was ticked when catalyst 14.4 installed some fooking AMD gaming app, three things struck me about it:

- It didn't have a close button...
- In programs & features it was called "raptr" which differs significantly to what the program was called in the toolbar at the top
- When uninstalling it, I was taken to a page to fill out a survey about why I was uninstalling it

Very poor show! Was kinda hoping that was a one-off.

Agreed.

What is the lady at the front desk going to do with this Raptr thing, except get annoyed? That's another thing: we're not all installing drivers for gaming.

 

[techmaniamaster]

I have 2 thinkpad-E355 laptops. One is Win7 32-bit system and the other one is Win8 64-bit system. I found that the internet access speed of Win7 one was much slower than Win8 one (5Mbps vs 50Mbps). I thought it was OS difference and prepared to upgrade Win7 to Win8. Before upgrading to Win8, I happened to upgrade Catalyst of the Win7 one from 14.2 to 14.12 which was the same as the Win8 one. And I found the network connection of the Win7 one was up to 50Mbps and it was the same of the Win8 one. So it was not the OS difference but the Catalyst version difference. I think there were some bugs in Catalyst 14.2 and Catalyst 14.12 has fixed them but AMD didn’t tell us about that.

 

[Essence_of_War]

When I have something I'm using for free w/ windows, like a desktop widget, or flash, or something similar, I fully expect every "express install" to be poisonous.

When I pay good money for a piece of hardware, I don't think it's unreasonable that drivers for that hardware not come with malware.

This is deeply embarrassing. I just picked up an A10 for my younger brother's new desktop (he is currently on an Athlon x2 and a GT 8500 and just wants to be able to play TF2 and DOTA!) and I'll be wary of this when I help him with the assembly and driver install.

 

[pom]

I read posts from other forums and someone mentioned that the latest AMD Quick Stream version had solved the problem. You could try to just upgrade AMD Quick Stream from AMD’s website: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDQuickStreamTechnology.aspxhttp://forums.anandtech.com/support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDQuickStreamTechnology.aspx

 

[holden j caufield]

running into these exact problems with a dell default image pc. Only thing is it's running an intel pc and intel integrated display

 

[VirtualLarry]

I went to the NIC properties, and there was this "AppEx Accelerator" installed, above the MS QoS miniport.

running into these exact problems with a dell default image pc. Only thing is it's running an intel pc and intel integrated display

You have the "AppEx Accelerator" miniport network driver installed? On an image with an Intel CPU and video?

 

[vinceapp]

I read posts from other forums and someone mentioned that the latest AMD Quick Stream version had solved the problem. You could try to just upgrade AMD Quick Stream from AMD’s website: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDQuickStreamTechnology.aspxhttp://forums.anandtech.com/support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDQuickStreamTechnology.aspx

I downloaded and installed the latest version of AMD Quick Stream, where it disables Rate Auto Detection(a default setting). It fully solved my problem.