Difference between Intel 7260, 7265, 8260, 8265?

Hello all,
Just recently getting back into the laptop game. Last time I was in it, the 7260 had just come out and I upgraded my computers to the AC standard.

So now I see there were successive versions of the AC cards. Is it just form factor difference to M.2 from the 7265 and up?
Still running pcie half mini cards in my units, so if that is the case I won't worry about it.

Never had any problems with the 7260.

 

This: http://ark.intel.com/compare/94150,86068,83635,75439

 

I'm also very interested in this question. Is there any difference between 7265 and 8260? Neither supports MU-MIMO, which is snake oil at the moment anyway...

 

That is very true. MU-MIMO doesn't work even if it's supposed to, and other than that there is almost no difference between two stream 802.11ac cards ranging from 7260 to 8265.
There are some obscure differences in protocols that no one has heard about - for example 8265 differs from 8260 in that it supports 802.11r and 802.11k. Google those if you wish - you'll see how unimportant these are. And there's MU-MIMO that we have already covered...

 

Hi. Actually I've never enabled 11r and 11k in the network I've installed. And everything works fine. If it does not it's always because of crappy client drivers and/or bad AP placement.
But I'm bothered about what you wrote abour MU-MIMO. Maybe an old post by now..or you still believe that it does not work ? I haven't tested it but would like to very much. That's why I'd like to upgrade my Intel 7265 to a more recent one. Should I do it ? Or not ?
Thanks !
Ciao.

 

@Alex_Italy get 9260, it's a real improvement unlike all the cards mentioned here, and not really expensive. Everything else is a waste of money. Ciao. (=

 

We will see about that - I'm ordering 9260 today. So far I cannot call 7260 and 7265, that I have in two of my notebooks, reliable mostly because of what seems to be terrible driver quality.

In fact I can't even use drivers Intel released to fix Krack because my throughput got 4 times lower as a result of installing them. What's more I had to disable and enable Intel card in device manager yesterday to make it work at a reasonable speed having transferred about 60GB beforehand - it would connect at 866MHz but transfer at 50mbps.

Because of this I have my doubts about how great 9260 really is - if driver quality is similar to other Intel cards, it's going to be a waste of money and time.
Besides I remember very well those praises of 8260 that I have heard back when it got launched - you can still find them in this forum. The same people now claim it's crap - with this sort of "expert" reviews 9260 might end up being a disappointment as well.

Anyway- mine should be on its way from China via regular mail so it will be a while before I will be able to write anything (hopefully) conclusive about it. I'm not in too much of a hurry since there are no routers that support 160MHz channels that I want...

 

@downloads thankfully my (1)8260 and 7260 are still good. I only use drivers from Windows update, not from Intel directly or laptop vendors, and typically change a few settings (prefer 5.2GHz band + limit 2.4GHz channel width to 20MHz).

Of course, I did have a lot of problems with 7260 shortly after it was introduced, like probably everyone here - but that was years ago. 8260 and 18260 were always stable for me, IIRC.

 

@Starlight5 What driver version do you have at the moment that is working fine with 7260? (and on what OS version)

 

@downloads 18.33.11.2 on 10 Pro x64 with Meltdown-Spectre patches applied.

 

In the interest of fairness I would like to amend this statement. I ordered Intel 9260 and to match its capabilities (160MHz channels) I also ordered a Linksys WRT3200ACM which got delivered first (the card is still on its way from China). As a result I now have Intel 7260 and 7265 working with a new router.

To my surprise both Intel 7260 and 7265 now have no more throughput problems with new drivers. It seems that since there were no more firmware updates for my previous router (TP Link Archer C7 v1) and Intel still provides updates for its 7260 and 7265 cards, newer Intel drivers don't work very well with older TP-Link firmware. I can't tell if it's security updates or just some incompatibility between drivers (firmware updates for routers also provide drivers for the wireless radios), but it seems that Intel might not be entirely to blame here.

Either way Linksys does not seem to have have those problem that TP-Link had.
Although - again - in the interest of fairness I'd like to reiterate that TP-Link did not have throughput problems with Intel cards running drivers that were roughly contemporary to its firmware release date. So I can't be sure who is to blame here but it seems I have been too rough on Intel.

 

MU-MIMO works well on the QCA9984 based routers like the Netgear R7800 and Synology RT2600AC but it is snake oil on Brodcom routers (ie Asus 88U/3100/5400, Netgear R8500) and actually causes a performance loss on those. SmallNetbuilder did testing and while they said improvements aren't miraculous the R7800 showed decent gains while Broadcom units were just downright bad with MU enabled. Intel 8265/9260ac support MU well and so do the Qualcomm clients, but if you have a Broadcom client like the Galaxy S7 that drops to a 1x1 link (433 Mbps).