From what I can find online, the Framework Laptop 12 ships with a Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX211 module, which appears to be a CNVio2 module.
Online sources say CNVio3 is not supported until Intel 14th Gen.
Does this mean the Laptop 12 stuck with CNVio2 modules, or can the slot do both CNVi and PCI-e ? There doesn’t seem to be a KB article for the Laptop 12 yet, like there is for the Laptop 13
– Edit: Marking solved, thanks to user Luke_Wurl for confirming that the PCI-e based BE200 module works fine in Windows 11 and Arch
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AFAIK, both CNVio2 and PCIe modules will work. CNVio37 modules won’t.
See here: Re: PCIe vs CNVio and CNVio 2 - Intel Community
not that i don’t believe you, but do you have a source?
i haven’t been able to find anything specific to the Laptop 12 that clearly indicates they wired the port up for PCIe.
we know they cost-cut out the USB4 / thunderbolt functionality on the Laptop 12, and i’m not sure if it would have been cheaper to not wire up PCIe to this port as well and do just CNVio2.
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The card slot on the FW12 is still standard PCIe.
CNVio2 just means that certain RF functions have been built into the CPU so the card itself can be more barebones.
That doesn’t prevent normal PCIe cards from working in the same slot
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Actually, I have an AX210 card and will test it once I get my FW (batch 10)
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cool! i’m batch 10 too! was planning on getting an BE200, but couldn’t find any hard proof that it should work, like there is for the other laptop models.
I’m vatch 8 and habe a BE200 card I’ll be testing
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OMG, sick! Looking forward to hearing if it works!
I’m using a BE200 card with no issues in both Arch and Windows 11 on my FW12
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cool! thanks for confirming!
I checked the intel “package specifications” and this is a PCIE wifi card. So maybe you confirmed a FW12 can use PCIE for wifi cards.
I have went out and bought an Intel BE201 card, and it straight up did not work even though I am on the correct Linux kernal.
I did not yet know about the CNvio interface, or that it had versions. So the BE201 is on 37, while the AX211 is on 2. This is probably our issue. I just need to find a source that confirms the CNVio37 version was not compatible with intel 13th gen.
Also, sorry this might not be PCI-e related, but I recently learned this and want to share my experience.
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from what i’ve read online, the intel wifi cards ending in the number 1 are CNVio cards. So, for example, the AX210 is a standard PCI-e radio, while the AX211 is the CNVio2 version.
Similarly, the BE200 is PCI-e and the BE201 is CNVio37.
From what i can find online via intel advertising posts, intel seems to indicate that the 14th gen was the first CPU gen to support Wi-Fi 7.
i’ve seen some mention online that certain motherboards and laptops can have either bios locked wifi modules and/or be cost cut to do only CNVio (and not PCI-e), however from other replies to this thread it seems we’ve confirmed the Framework Laptop 12 can do PCI-e radios, and the BE200 module.
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That is kind of the beauty of pcie devices, outside of some oddball issues (like in the case of the be 200 and modern amd platforms) as long as you got pcie and can physically connect it it’ll work. You could stick this thing into a pentium 4 and have wifi7 (probably even older but I am sure pentium 4 had pcie).
The whole cnvio malarkey saves the laptop manufacturers a couple cents on the modules and it doesn’t really hurt them as they don’t really care about reusability or having to worry about what works with what.
Wait really? I’d of thought Cnvio, and especially bluetooth from Cnvio2 would of made it impossible even if you got past the power constraint (I have no doubt a solution to that could be rigged fairly easily) 802.11ac seems to be the current “goldilocks zone” between performance, conectivity, and compatibility to my understanding
The pcie cards (for intel the ones ending in 0) work just fine on any pcie platform (appart from whatever is wrong with the be200 but that’s a bug not a feature). cnvio cards only work on their intended platforms.
Nah ax is probably the goldiclocks as you can get the ax210 with a+e key (and even mpcie for pre m.2 hardware) and ax is signifficantly better than ac, especially on the 2.4ghz band. But electronically there is no reason for a pcie+usb(for the bluetooth) based network card not to work on any pcie (and usb if you want bt) based platform. For be it looks like everyone switched to e-key which makes it incompatible with a lot of older hardware that as a+e-key slots which is a bit of a shame.
Very interesting, I read somewhere and took it as golden truth that the comunication of “converged wireless” wasn‘t backwards compatible with the bluetooh over usb header and it caused failure. That was likely something specifc to whatever I was reading about and extrapolated. Thank you, I feel I may need to do some reading on the history of the m.2 physical connector and its uses
Converged wireless is likely referring to the cnvio stuff which is indeed has very narrow compatibility, but we are not using that when using the pcie version. Pcie is remarkably compatible, you can stick a 5090 into a pcie1x1 slot and it’ll “work”.
The connector is only tangentially related here, with enough adapters you can stick an ax210 into a normal pcie slot (and wire up usb if you want bt).
In fact I used one of those adapters to plug the be200 into an egpu enclosure to see if I could get it to play with my and framework that way (hard crashed the system as soon as it connected, fun)
a few days ago someone confirmed a BE200 radio as working on the FW12 in both Arch and Win 11, which means the M.2 slot is definitely wired up for PCI-e
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It may be limited to cnvio2 if you want to use cnvio modules but you can also use whatever pcie ones you want. In the case of cnvio part of the wifi chipset is built into the soc and part is on the module so you have a pretty narrow range of compatibility. In the case of pcie modules the whole thing is on the module which just connects via pcie and usb(or serial or i2c/s in some cases for bluetooth). This has pretty much no platform requirements other than there being pcie.