Typical Wi-Fi module temperatures (AMD RZ616 / MediaTek MT7922)

Hi, today I had a surprising experience with the Wi-Fi card: I started pushing a lot of data to a backup server, and after a few minutes of sustained ~120 Mbps traffic, the Wi-Fi module temperature climbed to quite toasty 110 °C. After some time, the laptop came into the sun for a while and it peaked even higher, at 114 °C.

What are your experiences with the MediaTek, and other Wi-Fi cards? I understand that without a cooler it’s normal for it to get hot, but many chips have a peak operating temperature around 100 °C, so I expected it to start throttling at some point. But it didn’t. I’m wondering if it spontaneously combusts if I ever achieve the max speed of 300 Mbps. :):fire:

I could not find a datasheet for the MT7922 or the Filogic 330 chip it uses, but a datasheet for some older MediaTek card (MT7628) listed maximum junction temperature as 125 °C. So perhaps these temperatures are normal and I just never noticed since my older card did not have a temperature sensor. Still a bit surprising though; I always thought of the Wi-Fi card as something that just sits there and uses almost no power…

2 Likes