Is there an 802.11ac card that's compatible with a Latitude D630?

Hi all. I've been a frequent haunt over on TabletPCReview's sister forums but I haven't posted over here before.

Anyway, I'm having some trouble. I bought an Intel 3160 wireless AC card to use with my Dell D630 because my Internet at home is almost double the speed of the stock wireless G card. However when the card was installed I ended up not being able to stay connected to anything for more than five minutes (after which it would lose all connectivity and stop seeing any wifi networks before randomly coming back to life). It couldn't even connect to the 5 GHz band coming from my router either.

I've issued a return for this card and reinstalled the wireless G card in order to stay connected but before I replace it I'd like to know what my options are. Can this laptop support an 802.11ac wifi card? If not what's the best N card to get for it? I need something that'll give me above 100 Mb/s throughput so I can actually use the full range of my bandwidth.

 

In theory there should be nothing stopping you from using the 3160 since Dell doesn't whitelist cards... but as you have found out, the D630 still just doesn't play nice with some cards. The safest bet is the Intel 4965, which is only N, but did ship with the D630. Dell-branded 5xxx cards also should have a pretty good chance of working.

 

Thanks. I see that it's dual-band N so at least I can use the 5 GHz band.

 

I had my dad buy me an Intel 7260 AC card to give it one more go. First time around it was still unstable and did the same thing. I uninstalled all the drivers from the system, restarted, the PC, and when it rebooted it was able to get a stable connection but it seemed to rate-limit itself to G speeds somehow. However after letting Windows Update grab a driver update for it, it went back to 5 GHz AC speeds (866.7 Mb/s) and it seems to have remained stable on top of that.

So I think this card is actually functional in this laptop!

 

SolidSonicTH,

How has your 7260 AC card been working out over the last 4 months?
I tried this card in my D630 over a year ago, and I had the same sort of problems you were having during your first attempts:
- I would load the drivers, and connect at 866.7mb/s -at first- It was absolutely blazing fast! But, after I either put the laptop to sleep, or rebooted, I couldn't connect, - it would connect something like 29mb/s, but would not actually connect at all (couldn't browse the web).
- I tired many things, but finally gave up.
- As new drivers come out for it I would try again, but no luck. *That was when they were on the ver 16.xxx drivers for the 7260AC.
*I see they are now up to ver 17.13.11.
*Maybe I should give it another try, but before I do I was wondering if:
- This card is still working for you, and you still able to connect at 866.7mb/s?
- Did you get the Blutetooth to function on this card?

Thanks in advance,
-miker71

Current Notebook:
D630, Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X9000 CPU/2.8ghz/6MB, 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD, Ultimate-N 6300 WiFi 450 Mbps, Nvidia Quadro 135M/128MB Dedicated, WXGA 1440x900, Flush Mount PCMCIA SDHC Card Reader, 12 cell Battery, Win7 64bit, BIOS A19