Wireless adapter and region restrictions.

[Perfarator]

I have problems with my wireless adapter and tried to ask an online support about that. I was so confused when they said that it's a matter of regional incompatibility. I bought the wireless adapter from US and i live in Belarus. What's the point?

 

[Synthesis]

 

 

To clarify, the issue is probably not with the wireless adapter, but the fact that we cannot process RMAs ondevices outside of their purchased region or outside of our service areas.

What is the issue you are having?

Thank you,

-John C

[HackPerception]

, 

 

There's really only two HW SKU's of the Wireless Adapter in practice. A global variation (EU, NAM are the same hardware) and a Chinese version. The global SKU has 3 channels (A,B,C) and the Chinese SKU has 2 channels (A,B) as the third channel is not approved for use by China's regulatory bodies.

 

Please provide more info about what issues you're encountering. 

[Perfarator]

The picture in my HMD reminds me a compressed jpeg. When i have missed frames it's even worse and more pixelated. I tried to switch between pci slots. Didn't help.

Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 3.30GHz

16 Gb ram

GTX 1070

[Perfarator]

Let's settle this. If i live in eastern europe, can i use an american version of Htc Vive Wireless adapter or not?

[HackPerception]

,

Yes, as stated clearly above there is only two SKUs of the wireless adapter: a global version for all territories except China as well as a Chinese variation. The US and EU version are identical hardware wise, the only difference are things like documentation and other things relating to legal/TOS. 

[HackPerception]

, 

If you're having issues with the adapter, it's not related to regionality and will mostly likely be related to 

• How your motherboard's PCI-E slots are wired
  • How these slots are configured via BIOS and how which slot your GPU is installed in affects the motherboard's autoconfiguration and lane options.
• Your CPU's strength. 

I strongly believe it's your processor which technically does not meet the minimum requirements of the adapter and your symptoms 100% match what would be expected if your CPU wasn't powerful enough. You're using a Xeon workstation CPU that's best suited for hyperthreaded tasks - the single core performance on this chip is far lower than on the I5 4750 which is our minimum requirement reference CPU. Your CPU is best for tasks like video editing, offline rendering, and for hosting servers. 

 

You can see in the benchmarks section of this comparison that the i5-4750 beats out your Xeon in every single benchmark test they ran. Here's results from another comparison website - every single benchmark I can find lists your Xeon below the i5 4750 target. You can try to confirm by using the task manager to check your CPU usage when wireless is running - I'm sure it will be hovering close to, or at, 100%. 

 

[Perfarator]

Thank you very much for help! Now i know what to do.

There is one last thing. Why russian tech support in online chat said that i have problems with regional restrictions? It looks like resposibility shifting...

[Perfarator]

A little update here. I tried a new motherboard with pci 3.0 and new cpu. Everything is much better now. Thanks for help again!

[HackPerception]

, Glad you were able to get it up and running. The answer to the call center question is complex - in short, I've gone through the steps to reach out to the hardware team and the team that manages the companion software to get finalized answers as I primarily support developers and enterprise customers and those vertical need very specific reasons about why something does or doesn't work. The average call center staff-member wouldn't have access to these escalation pathways to follow up on it.

 

Don't get me wrong though - there definitely are regional differences between the wireless adapters. It's primarily a packaging and legal thing. For instance, I can't take a US version and sell it in Canada unless the packaging meets specific requirements imposed by the Canadian goverment and both the external packaging and internal documentation contains the proper French translations. In this specific case though, there's only two SKUs of hardware: global and China.