I have this new laptop with an Intel AX200 wireless card. I just noticed the way it set's up in Windows 10 is as "802.11a/b/g Wireless mode" which is slower than changing it to "802.11a/g wireless mode". My laptop is real fast so it took a little bit to find this. I am thinking it changes the latency.
I also switched in Windows 10 to 5 GHz to preferred mode.
I tested this myself and found the same thing as you coxhaus. Thank you for finding this.
You may want to update those drivers though, they're old. The current ones are 21.80.2.1
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html
The link above helps me keep the Intel drivers updated and doesn't interfere with the Thinkpad drivers on my laptops. Be sure you update both the WiFi and the Bluetooth drivers together if you don't use the Intel Driver and Support Assistant from the link above.
How I tested the above is I downgraded to the driver version you used, rebooted the laptop, tested my normal browsing, changed the settings as suggested, rebooted the laptop once more, and compared.
There was a positive difference on my fast laptop too (4-core 8-thread and 64GB RAM on Windows 10 Pro).
Then I updated the drivers to the latest version (21.80.2.1) and did the appropriate reboots between tests and found the latest drivers to be even faster.
I tested with the RT-AX88U router about 38' and a floor and a couple of walls away with the laptop in Better Performance Power mode.
I repeated the same tests above with the RT-AX58U about 48' away on the same floor and a wall or two (depending on how the RF signal bounces) and found it equal for WiFi performance.
Both connections showed a 2.4GHz indicated connection rate in Windows (with both routers running 160MHz bandwidth mode).
The older driver without the tweak coxhaus found was the slowest at around 500-520Mbps download and upload. Changing that setting upped that to 550Mbps both ways or so, but it isn't significant.
The new driver changed the downloads to over 650Mbps and peaking at over 850Mbps with the tweak applied. This is significantly faster. Uploads peaked at 930Mbps (almost double!).
The unloaded latencies as reported by fast.com went down to 2ms (for the new driver and tweak) on most tests from the 4-5ms before.
The loaded latencies as reported by fast.com went from 14ms to 11ms avg. and the lowest seen a few times was 8-9ms with the new driver and tweak applied.
As
@coxhaus states, it is a slight but real difference on an otherwise already fast laptop.
I hope to see more people test and report their results too.
Oh, and when I was doing the testing, the laptop at the two different locations was on a desk and not moved in the slightest between tests.
@coxhaus what other tweaks can you discover for us?