[SOLVED] Mini PCI-E Wifi card upgrade

[SSri]

We have an old Samsung NP900X4D. This has an i5-3317U CPU, 8 GB Ram, upgraded Samsung 256 GB SSD and run Win 10 Pro and it still boots under 30s.

We connect directly to an external display as the screen is damaged. We plan to use iPad as the main display thru‘ Duet. We are unable to find any replacement display.

The mini PCIE wifi card is Intel N6235, which is extremely slower. I want to upgrade the wifi with Intel Ax200. It requires a mini-PCIE adaptor. I am unable to find any good adaptor.

Thinking of using this combo in this machine please. We would appreciate any thoughts and recommendations.

Thx!

 

[bill001g]

Are you sure the adapter card will fit. Most pci-e mini cards are almost square that card looks too long.

Be very careful buying anything online Most actual intel parts actually say intel on them. I am not sure how you tell valid ones. Some vendors will actually put photo of real cards that say intel and still ship fakes. Look at other photos of this card and you will see my concerns.

Some the fakes work fine and they are just ripping off intel by not paying their fees but other fakes do not work well.

I have never heard of anyone use a adapters like that in a laptop.

 

[SSri]

Are you sure the adapter card will fit.

Thx for your reply.

That’s the doubt I also have. The good part it’s just a couple of quids. I have been searching a decent looking adaptor in vain. The safer alternative is an AC card, though it’s only bluetooth 4.0. 😊

 

[bill001g]

I would not be too concerned with wifi6. First you need a router that can run wifi6. Next wifi6 is already outdated wifi6e equipment is starting to become more available.

In real life wifi6 many times does not run faster than 802.11ac. There are 2 features that make wifi6 faster. QAM1024 encoding and that really only works well close to the router. Next the use of 160mhz channels. Many cheaper wifi6 routers only support 80mhz which is the same as wifi6. Most cellphones do not support 160mhz either but the ax200 card does. They key reason they all do not support it is because of the problem of actually getting a 160mhz wide channel. There are all kinds of rules about weather radar. So even 160mhz device may drop back to 80mhz.

Wifi6e is hopefully going to solve a lot of this with the new bandwidth on 6ghz. This should solve the weather radar issue as well as have lots of bandwidth so neighbors do stomp on each other.

So unless you already have a wifi6 router that has 160mhz I would wait for wifi6e. I suspect you will have the same issue not much new stuff comes as pcie. You best bet would be a external usb adapter.

 

[SSri]

Waiting makes sense. Thank you.

We are in the process of bringing network changes - firewall router, additional APs after a proper wifi survey leveraging Netspot pro (hence looking to upgrade the wifi card on the laptop! 😊), smart light switches, doorbell camera, security cameras at the back end, etc.

We are aware that it’s a journey, which we want to take one step at a time. As one of the mods advised on the other thread, we will secure and lock the network first before adding more risks.

The next step is upgrading & adding additional APs . So, we can definitely wait.

 

[gggplaya]

Duet Display looks fuzzy and terrible, just saying. I use it when I travel for work as a secondary display on a 12.9" ipad pro. I would never use it for my primary display.

The Intel 7260 should be fine with wireless AC and give you great speed. The AX200 won't net you too much faster speeds unless there's significant wifi congestion on your router. The AX210 is wifi 6E and will give you much faster speeds thanks to 6ghz and 160mhz channel width, but you also need a Wifi 6E router to use with it.

 

[SSri]

@gggplaya Thanks for your reply. At the moment, I am connected to a desktop display. The laptop is still very responsive after the Samsung upgrade. What mobile display would you recommend, if I want a portability, please ?

Yeah! I was thinking of 7260 as an interim fix until I the firewall-router is sorted. I can then look at 6e AP, if / when it is available.

 

[gggplaya]

Personally I would just fix the laptop, but for mobile displays we use ASUS displays at work. I would make sure you get the 1080p screen and not 768, especially if working with excel.

I already owned the ipad, so I bought the DUET display app. I quickly found out how terrible it was on my first business trip. I don't travel enough to justify asking my boss for a portable display, but several of my coworkers have them and love them.

 

[SSri]

The laptop is Samsung NP9004XD. I have been and still looking around for the replacement. Not easy.
Thx for the Asus heads up. I will check. Cheers.