Looking around online, I can see some evidence that other people are having similar issues with other brands of laptop and the RZ616 card. So, I was wondering if I could swap out this MediaTek/AMD experiment for something that will be, hopefully, more reliable. Probably an Intel card.
Does anyone have any experience doing such a thing with their Framework Laptop? Is there anything I should consider that might cause me problems?
As always, your knowledge and advice are very much appreciated.
Currently the best option is propably the Intel AX210 card. But just make sure you don’t take the vPro model or sometimes called the AX211 model as those only work with Intel cpus.
There are also some Wifi7 options but some of those are still litlle hit and miss, the qualcomm chipset ones are propably currently the safest options. Of course only if you need/have Wifi7 at home.
I swapped it to AX200NGW I had sitting around, during the initial assembly (DIY model). To this day, RZ616/MT7922 has never even seen any power applied to it.
Works fine. Why not AX210? Because I didn’t have one and I didn’t care enough about WiFi/BT to buy one.
I upgraded my 13" FW from an Intel board to an AMD, so I was left with the original AX210 card. No issues at all. Like others have said, just make sure not to use the AX211 variant, because it requires an Intel CPU to function properly, whereas an AX210 card will work with any CPU.
I also have an AX200 installed and it’s been working fine. I have an RTL8852AE card here too but haven’t tried it.
The swap from the MT7922 to the AX200 did not improve WiFi signal strength at all; the laptop still shows a ‘medium’ strength signal when other laptops in the same location show a full strength signal, so I’m assuming the antenna configuration in the FW16 is less than ideal.
Thanks for your replies and suggestions, everyone. I think I will give this a go and, hopefully, eliminate the ‘fly in the ointment’ that is the poor WiFi and Bluetooth performance of my FW 16.
@James_Moss If I remember correctly, the FW16 wi-fi/bluetooth card is at the top left corner. It resembles an nvme 2230 sized SSD drive with the two antenna wires connected to one end. Those antenna just snap on (some older ones slide on I believe). Below is a picture showing a close-up of the antenna connector ports on the card :
I have swapped for an AX210 and it works great. It’s definitely a more consistent performer (as in no weird ping spikes), but has weaker bluetooth. Overall the difference wasn’t as big as I heard about.
I have tried a few wifi cards recently and based on my experience:
RTL8852 < MT7922 ≈ AX200 < AX210
I ended up rating the AX200 and MT7922 about the same at my home setup as the MT7922 has significantly superior bluetooth, gets better throughput on strong signals, same throughput on weak signals, but has a weird stuttering issue where ping times suddenly goes really high for about 5 seconds every now and then.
The RTL8852 is absolutely terrible. It has at-best half the throughput of any other card at the same location (more often about a quarter), have incredibly inconsistent ping times, high packet loss, randomly drops, and even have terrible bluetooth performance. Anything is a notable upgrade over that.
It came with my son’s HP laptop, and we put in the MT7922 I got from my FW16 and the difference was immediately noticeable.
Just a quick update for anyone following this thread: I swapped out the RZ616 for an Intel AX210. As soon as I booted up the system I connected to the internet via Ethernet and Windows proceeded to download drivers for WiFi and Bluetooth.
I had to add my Bluetooth devices again from scratch and some of the old instances in my list of Bluetooth device seem stuck and I’m unable to remove them, so I have duplicates, but the new connection instances work perfectly.
I did notice that the Intel AX210 establishes connections to new devices faster than the RZ616 ever seemed to. But, only time will tell if I now have the stability I’ve been searching for.
I’ve done this for my past 3 AMD laptops. Unfortunately, with the FW16 I made the mistake of not testing the included WiFi card first, because after the swap my BT range was less than 1 foot. I never felt like the antenna connectors made great contact on the new card (and I wonder if the plastic bracket on the default card was a crutch around this), so I ordered another antenna assembly and did a swap. The new assembly connectors clicked into place easily on the Intel AX210 and everything works fine.
