M11xR1, 802.11ac WiFi and Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260

Is the Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 card compatible with an M11xR1 running Win7 64bit?

Update - Yes it works. See rest of the thread for more information and updates on drivers.

Sorry if this question has been asked, but a quick Google didn't find any M11xR1/R2 references.

I have a Gigabit Ethernet home network with a QNAP NAS serving all my data.

I currently use an ASUS EA-N66 5GHz Access Point over Gbit Ethernet which has an access speed of 450Mbits at which my sock M11xR1 DW1520 connects at 300Mbits using 5GHz Wi-Fi.

I have tested and get a 'real' data throughput of 130Mbits which is fine.

But if I go 802.11ac I thought it may be nice to have an 802.11ac client WiFi interface to connect to the network with.

What are the huddled masses with M11xR1/R2 using when it comes to 802.11ac?

Is it the case that our PCIe half mini card is running off the USB bus and what does that do for data throughput???

Oh and I'm not keen on the idea of an external USB 2.0 (480Mbits) 802.11ac adapter.

 

It may not work properly as it is not a supported upgrade and drivers will not be easy to find.

 

Ah. Thank you.

I did find a similar question on the M14x forum.

 

Yep, it should work just fine. I have an Intel 7260ac card ready to go for my R1, but I haven't had chance to install it yet.

Laptop WiFi cards are usually a simple swap - but some manufacturers (notably HP) keep a "whitelist" of cards in the BIOS, and cards not on the whitelist, won't work.
The M11X R1 doesn't do this - I previously swapped out the WiFi card for a different model with no issue.

You can pickup the Intel 7260ac from eBay for around $30 and then you'll need the drivers from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Se...ductProduct=Intel®+Dual+Band+Wireless-AC+7260

Note that the Intel cards usually come with onboard Bluetooth, so you should probably disable the M11X's inbuilt Bluetooth - you might see some interesting problems running two different Bluetooth stacks in the same machine

 

At the next intersection, turn right.
You have chosen to turn left.??

With that in mind I purchased a GIGABYTE™ GC-WB867D-I which is a 802.11ac PCIe card for a PC.

I was after an Intel 7260 802.11ac mini card which was stocked, but the computer shop guy said what about a GIGABYTE™ card for a few extra dollars?
I would get a whole PCIe card and aerial with an on-board Intel 7260 wireless-AC card which can just be unscrewed and placed into M11xR1.

Anyway, short story, I've installed the 7260 802.11ac PCIe mini card and it works with the drivers from the included GIGABYTE™ driver CD.

I did a quick bandwidth test using iPerf to my NAS via an ASUS EA-N66 AP (450Mbit 5Ghz) and now get the following:

Intel 7260 802.11n (5GHz) - 157Mbits real throughput and connects at 300Mbits.
DW1520 802.11n (5GHz) - 113-130Mbits real throughput and connects at 300Mbits.

I'm seeing a 20- 40Mbits improvement over my DW1520 in the same 5GHz environment.
I have no 802.11ac AP or routers at this time, so no 802.11ac tests.

I have not looked at the configuration and will probably be able to improve things slightly as well.

So... Intel 7260 802.11ac mini card can be installed and will provide 5GHz service on an M11xR1.

I have not tested further than this and will continue to use the Intel 7260 802,11ac mini card in my M11xR1 unless it proves to be problematic in the future.

[Update]

Since WiFi worked, I installed the Bluetooth drivers and that seems to work too.
Had my 'original' Bluetooth disabled, but after the GIGABYTE™ driver install now only see one Bluetooth adapter and that's noted as Bluetooth v4.0.

It works and that's all I care about at this time.

I have a Bluetooth v4 headset and that pairs and sounds as good as ever.

Also 'perceive' that I may be able to support a wider range of Bluetooth profiles than before, but I can't confirm that at this time.

So... still all good and nothing has gone belly up yet.

WiDi is a no go due to Hardware, which is to be expected... but I did try.

[ Update]

Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 14/10/2013
Driver Version: 16.6.0.8

Seems to be a few problems with connection speeds.
You have to Disconnect and then re-Connect to the Wi-Fi AP to get 300Mbits connection speed.
This can drop to 24 - 80Mbits on connection and then needs to be reset
I've read a few complaints about this over the last 6 months and Intel doesn't seem to be in any hurry to fix the problems.
So just be aware of connection issues with The Intel 7260 AC wiFi card.

As it's using the M11xR1 USB bus, this could present it's own problems as USB on the M11xR1 is not the best in class.


[ Update]

Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 28/01/2014
Driver Version: 16.10.0.5

Updated the Intel 7260 802.11ac mini card drivers and over the last couple of days I have seen a rock solid 300Mb connection with no drops to lower speeds where one would have to disconnect/reconnect to establish wireless AP connection again.

So it looks like Driver Version 16.10.0.5 may be the one.

No problems thus far and will update if I do have problems. So if you don't see any updates, then assume that everything is fine

[ Update]

Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 18/03/2014
Driver Version: 17.0.0.0

This driver and the accompanying Bluetooth driver, seem to be stable with no noticeable drops or connection speed re-sync.
Was getting connection speed re-sync's and hangs, but they seem to be a thing only related to older drivers versions.

Working well on 802.11n (not tried 802.11ac yet) and 64bit Win 7

Getting good and stable 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections.

AND Bluetooth driver update is a bonus with Bluetooth 4.0 devices.


[ Update]

Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 23/04/2014
Driver Version: 17.0.3.2

This driver and the accompanying Bluetooth driver, seem to be stable with no noticeable drops or connection speed re-sync.

Working well on 802.11n (not tried 802.11ac yet) and 64bit Win 7

Getting good and stable 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections.

AND Bluetooth driver update is a bonus with Bluetooth 4.0 devices.

 

Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 17/11/2014
Driver Version: 17.13.2.2

This driver and the accompanying Bluetooth driver, seem to be stable with no noticeable drops or connection speed re-sync.

Getting good and stable 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections.

Getting good throughput with 802.11ac to ASUS RT-AC66U wireless router.

I am seeing benchmark peaks of 320Mbits/sec with writes to a QNAP NAS.

With an SSD the download/write IO could be higher too. (SATA2 considered)

As previously stated the M11xR1 is using a USB 2.0 'bus' to support the Intel wireless-AC 7260 card which still translates into good throughput for this device.

FTP download returns approx 155Mbits/sec using original Seagate 500MB HDD
FTP upload to a NAS (Red Pro HDD and 8GB of RAM) return approx 252Mbits/sec.

I so have to get an SSD for my M11xR1... :thumbsup:

AND Bluetooth driver update is a bonus with Bluetooth 4.0 devices.

 

Great little machines. I picked up a r3 with the i7-2637m and the 2gb 540 gpu in pristine condition. This little machine is awesome. Mine has the intel 1000 wifi card and dell Bluetooth. I am thinking of putting in a different wifi card but for what I use the machine for this one seems great and I get excellent range with it. I put a 256gb ssd in it over the weekend and reloaded it, pretty sick for suck a small machine. I ran BF4 on it on medium settings on a 64player server and got between 35-50fps. Now of course I did not buy it for those purposes, but just had to try it.

 

Sweet.

The Intel WiFi Link 1000 is a 2.4GHz only, PCIe mini card.
If it's working and providing the service you require, then stick with it.

As a rule of thumb the maximum bandwidth of a 300Mbps card is ~150Mbps, which mostly translates into ~110Mbps using 40MHz.

I believe your Bluetooth is on the motherboard and not integrated into the WiFi card, so no matter what WiFi card you have you should have Bluetooth. On my M11xR1, built-in Bluetooth was only 2.1, so in card Bluetooth 4.0 on the wireless PCIe card was a bonus.

An upgraded 802.11ac card would give you 5GHz 802.11a/n and 802.11ac. This would push your wireless bandwidth potential up significantly. This would also allow you to escape the 2.4GHz frequency, which in many areas is VERY crowded these days.

You'd also need a good wireless router to support an upgraded 2.4/5GHz WiFi card.

The 5GHz frequency will NEVER improve your wireless range or throughput at distance, but if you don't have range/coverage issues, then this will improve bandwidth throughput significantly at closer ranges ~10m/30ft.

The M11xR3 has 1000Mbit Ethernet which the M11xR1(only 10/100Mbit) never had.

I have a couple of Network Attach Storage (NAS) devices which provide all my data storage and thus ~300Mbits(new card) is better than ~80Mbits(old card)

Expect this to be even better on an M11xR3 with a USB3.0 bus.

All good.

 

Cool thanks for the tip/info. Yeah it has the bluetooth card seoerate from the wifi. I might upgrade the wifi at some point. I don't use the machine that often, I really just wanted one that was in pristine shape maxed out gpu/cpu for nostalgic reason I think. I was blown away at how well it ran bf4 on medium settings, pretty amazing for such a machine. If I start using it more for streaming video or transferring files I might upgrade the wifi. I have a couple decent routers at home I switch between a lot depending on what I'm doing that are AC.