As I heard, and experienced, the MediaTek WiFi card isn’t the greatest, in fact it may cause trouble.
ANy of you are planning to swap that for Intel AX210 or the like?
I am thinking of adding to my order an AX210… what do you think?
Probably going to swap one in too, but I already have some laying around so if it for some reason doesn’t work I have not lost much.
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Hm… I’ve got an Intel AX210 that I put in my old 2015 Dell Latitude a year ago as a repair part for the older wifi card.
It’s in the WAN Slot, would this fit on the mainboard of the Framework?
(Waiting on my batch 4 Ryzen 7 Framework, so can’t test it yet. Maybe I’m simply okay with the card that’s on there…)
If it’s m.2 a+e key, yes. If it’s mini pcie then no.
2015 could be either, that’s right on the cusp of when m.2 started to take over.
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to my understanding, the Ax210 is using NGFF (M.2 Key E+A).
THe AX211 tho is CNVio or CNVio2 which is Intel proprietory… (Key E)
so AX210 should work
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They also make them in an mpcie form factor
the pcie vs intels proprietary fuckery protocol is electrical, mpcie vs m.2 is physical
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If the longest part is the one with the pins it’s mpcie.
Here is a random comparison image I found (mpcie on the left, m.2 a+e key on the right).
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I’m going to give the Mediatek a chance, it’s not like my current Intel AX200 is as rock solid as the Atheros one was in my previous notebook (kinda sad that Atheros got assimilated).
If it’s no good I’ll get a replacement later on. At least we can do so on these systems.
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I will happily trade anyone a spare AX210 (I have 2 on hand) for the RZ616 / MT7922 that comes with the AMD boards. Mediatek is way better in my opinion with Linux in tree driver, though I’ve only tested using the RZ608 / MT7921 so far.
Yup, after years on Linux and OpenWRT this (edit: not just presence, but also active maintenance/contribution/participation from the vendor) is the predictor of success. So, planning on using the Mediatek adapter on my batch 5.
Incidentally, this will be primarily on a WLAN with a Mediatek-based Netgear WAX206 OpenWRT router/AP, which
replaced an ath10k (post-assimilation) based OpenWRT router/AP (Netgear R7800) that was having issues for years.
Whereas, the pre-assimilation (or at least pre completion of assimilation, not sure about the timeline) ath9k based Buffalo WHR-HP-AG300H I’m also using (again with OpenWRT) has been stupidly stable and up to date for the 12+ years I’ve had it.
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Is the Wifi 6E functionality working again with the AX210 in the Framework laptop?
Yeah, it was an Ath9k that was so rock solid for me. If there’s an in-tree kernel driver for the Mediatek card that gets bundled, it will probably work just fine as that means it’s maintained by the kernel network team, which have a fantastic track record.
I’m referring to this issue:
i.e. Will AX210 6GHz work with the AMD board? Doesn’t it need some kind of BIOS support to set a flag or something?
If anyone received their AMD 13 with the RZ616 (Mediatek), can you do me a favour and let me know if the performance is good/bad?? I probably still can add a WiFi card to my order… am at later batch… thank you!
Yeah the ath9k was a nice anomaly and we probably won’t get anything anywhere near as open ever again.
Having something 6e that is as open as ath9k would be the dream but imagine the screaming regulators XD (well not entirely unjustified but still).
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Actually, the regulators would not be justified at all. Copyright patents on hardware is hell for security and privacy.
As for if this is an anomaly, perhaps it is for the foreseeable future, but there are folks working on this according to nitrokey developers. I got a message about it once.
This is however very alpha last I checked… so its not happening for a while.
But it is hope at least for the next 5-10 years probably.
I just did the swap from the RZ616 / MT7922 to the AX210. Overall performance seems to be similar for me on Windows, still need to test Linux. Peak power consumption does seem to be lower. Power consumption during YouTube / streaming seems to be a tad lower maybe 200-500 mw. Idle power consumption seems to be roughly the same. Standby time for Windows seems to be similar at ~0.6% per hour.
I think the Linux side would be potentially better / have less issues, but will need to test.
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I didn’t mean those regulators. I meant the FCC and local equivalents.
Wifi n mostly only used ism bands so if someone abused their freedom they would mostly only interfere with other commercial or consumer equipment . That didn’t stop the regulators from throwing a fit then but 6e also shares frequencies with stuff like weather/airport radar, cell networks and stuff like that.
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I get much better performance from the mt7921(2) devices than the AX200(10) based devices I have in my network for reference. So am actually a big fan of it. It supports AP and MON modes the AX200 does not and has a relatively complete OpenSource implementation vs the Blobby intel.
I think most of the reports were from people inserting them into non-validated Intel Windows laptops in combiation with buggy vendor firmwares. They have been nothing but stellar in my openwrt routers and in the FW13 AMD I received so far and I have realworld 1.9GBitrx /1Gbit tx perf out of them with normal crappy wifi induced latency.
If you want performance then wire it up. The FW13 has USB4/Thunderbolt which will net you a 20Gbit Duplex network interface for free when attached to a Workstation with a 10Gbit Dock you’re good to go.
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