Intel 5300

I am looking to upgrade my wireless in my laptop to one that supports the 5ghz band. I tried the atheros ar928x but it would not see any 5ghz signals (my Asus has the non 5ghz atheros in it). I tried the broadcom 4321 from a HP I had and it worked good for the brief time I tested it. I have read on some sites that the Intel cards will not work on NON intel chipset systems. Can anyone confirm this? I only have 2 internal antennas but have a couple of spares that came with the atheros.

 

AFAIK 5300 will not work on laptops which use non-intel chipsets mainly due to its driver is designed that way (by Intel of course). I don't know in other operating system environments such as Linux.

Regarding the antenna, you can use 2 antennas, but it will be best if you add the extra one since you have it already.

 

I'm not sure how tight the card is locked down and whether its a driver hack or a real limitation... but its not locked down as much as their documentation claims.

So far I've used just fine it in other chipset families not on their list (x58 and 925x for example) just fine. Granted those are desktop boards not on their testing radar for a minicard.

The only non-intel system I tried was a nvidia northbridge (mcp 430 I think) for amd, but its an older one with pci-e 1.0 that also had problems working with a graphics card in the past.

It got as far as installing the driver but then bluescreens with XP. I didn't try Win7 or any serious troubleshooting because that system is not ready to upgrade. Maybe if knoppix is updated to a recent enough kernel I could test using that.

There are some ath9k dual band minicards available, did you mean it didn't work because of antennas or because the card you had was not dual band?

 

The atheros I tried was a AR928x that says it is 2.4/5ghz but it would not see my Linksys. The Broadcom I tried (4321) saw it just fine. Luckily the ebay merchant I got it from is swapping it for the broadcom one.