Wireless adapter Netgear A6210 ac and 5ghz problems

Hi, been having trouble of late with my A6210 adapter. Even using the latest driver version (1.0.0.36 as of today), both windows and netgear's genie cannot detect the 5ghz network of my router, just the 2.4ghz one. When I uninstall the driver and genie, it connects to 5ghz fine BUT only on 802.11n instead of ac. Any advice?

OS is windows 10 64 bit home (supposedly compatible with latest driver)

Router is Asus RT-AC1200G+

Router Settings:

I have tried playing around with the control channels and channel bandwidth to no effect, also setting wireless mode to n/ac mixed ( there is no option for ac only for this router). No luck. Have also tried changing the network adapter's settings in Windows too (USB speed max 3.0, etc) but I still get this:

As you can see I have uninstalled the adapter driver to be able to connect to 5ghz so the device is showing up as "802.11ac Wireless Lan Card". How do I force this adapter to connect with ac only? To confirm it is not a router issue, I plugged in an old adapter I had (some TPlink model) and it connected with ac just fine.