M.2/NGFF wireless cards in Precision M4X00, M6X00 (my experience with M6700)

Don't know why I can't find a Wi-Fi card that I like...
The Intel 9260 is generally good, but I have had many occurrences where it seemed to cap itself off at 60 Mbps while connected to a 5 GHz 802.11ac network. This would just "happen" after a while, maybe once every other week; rebooting or just disabling/re-enabling the WLAN card would fix it. (I normally reboot only two or three times per month, so it might be more likely to happen with long uptime?) A 60 Mbps cap isn't immediately noticeable for Internet traffic (especially when my Comcast connection is already capped at 70 Mbps), but I would notice when a LAN transfer like my image backup was taking forever or when just moving big files to or from my file server would be going slower than normal; also when this was going on and I had a big transfer going using all of the 60 Mbps, other transfers (i.e. random Internet browsing) would be dead slow. I tried multiple driver versions, a few different options in the "advanced" device settings in Device Manager, and I even tried using two different kinds of routers, but it would always eventually happen.

I picked up a Broadcom BCM4356 based card (this is Broadcom's "wave 2" 802.11ac chipset), specifically the Azurewave AW-CB210NF-P, which is also M.2/NGFF. Seems good so far but I've only been using it for one day. We'll see.....

 

Just a random thought.... Is it due to power saving mode kicking in?

 

I dunno, I did turn off "this device can be turned off to conserve power" and any power-related-seeming option that I could find in the "Advanced" tab in Device Manager...

 

I have a Wi-Fi 6 / 802.11ax setup in my house now. I am using a pair of Asus RT-AX92U routers (mesh) and I just got an Intel AX200 NGFF card, which is installed in my M6700.

Early testing, I can push a bit over half a gigabit over the LAN. I'm not sure if the bottleneck is the wireless or the server I am using on the other end. (It is attached directly to the router by gigabit Ethernet, but it is about a decade old low-spec machine.) With an AC card I would get around 350 Mbps.

AT&T has been active digging and dropping fiber lines my the area, hoping they activate the fiber node by my house soon so that I can try out gigabit Internet.

 

Only if those fancy cards have working drivers for windows 7 *sigh*

 

Wouldn't be surprised if you could just install the 10 drivers on 7.

 

So it turns out that maybe this was all unnecessary?

Intel appears to be letting people take the AX200 chip and slap it onto other things. I recently was working with a family member on a new desktop build and his motherboard had the AX200 chip built-in. I just now saw that someone has built a mini-PCIe AX200 card which you can purchase for under $20, and could be fitted into one of these systems without an adapter.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/283730742854

I ordered one of these cards and will report back...

 

Hallo Aaron,
This was a very Good hint from you. I found an AX200HMW in a Chinese Shop for Around 15 $. I was able to complete replace the integrated 7260AC in a Dell Precision 6800 with Even the Original Antenna cables. And it Worked in a few Minutes. It´s great, but I didn’t get the expected Push in throughput. I get only 250 Mbit against an 11ac Router. I am still searching where the Problem is...

 

Are you totally sure that it is connecting at 5 GHz and not 2.4 GHz? I've been able to get 350-400 Mbps to an AC router. (It is normal to get well below the rated speed.)