Wireless AC card for the m11x R3?

Does anyone have any experience or insight into upgrading the wireless card in the m11x R3 to support Wireless AC?
The machine is running Windows 8.1 Pro, I'm hoping the standard drivers from intel will work?

In particular I have been looking at the Intel 7260 card ( Intel 7260HMW IEEE 802.11AC, dual-band, 2x2 Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 4.0 Mini PCI Express combo Adapter - 867 Mbps+300Mbps - Internal - Wireless Adapters - Newegg.com), but am open to suggestions if there are any better options out there.

Thanks!

 

I haven't seen any success stories with them on the m11x series, but you can always test it and let us know the results.

 

Cool. Then I have a success story of sorts.

I have an Intel Wireless-AC 7260 working very stably in my Alienware M11xR1 running windows 7 Pro.
The Bluetooth 4.0 component is a bonus and works well with all my Bluetooth devices.

The latest drivers are very stable and have been (and will be) improved immensely due to their popularity in Intel NUC boxes going forward.
The old Wireless-AC 7260 drivers of 2013 tended to drop connections and/or reset the connection to approx 24Mbits. i.e. fail.

I have read of problems with the wireless-AC 7260 when used on a 2.4GHz AP, but I use it ONLY on 5GHz 40MHz and have no problems.

And now the caveats.
The M11xR1 Mini half PCIe slot is running off the USB 2.0 bus and thus 'gimps' any real benefits of using a PCIe 802.11ac WiFi card.
That said I have no regrets in upgrading my original DELL DW1520 to the Intel wireless-AC 7260.

Using my M11xR1 with a 802.11n 40MHz 5GHz SSID I see real throughput of 136Mbits/sec.
Using the old original DW1520 in the same environment I was only able to see approx 118MBits/sec.
These tests are only using 802.11n 5GHz, so I would expect to see over 150Mbits/sec when using 802.11ac on an Alienware M11xR1(USB 2.0)

The card will be subject to the USB 2.0 480Mbits/sec interface the PCIe mini card is plugged into.

The M11xR1 only has 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet, so any gain in WiFi is a real gain.

I'm just paying it forward at the moment as I don't have an 802.11ac router/AP...yet.

On an Alienware M11xR3 it is possible the PCIe card is plugging into a USB 3.0 bus(need to verify)
This means the limitations of a USB 2.0 bus don't apply to an M11xR3.
But this would need to be checked.

I have an Intel Wireless-AC 7260 card plugged into an Intel Core i5 NUC with PCIe mini card slot running Win8.1 and it returns 211Mbits/sec real throughput when using a 40MHz 5GHz AP(Linksys E4200v1 Tomato fw router).

Some other Wireless-AC 7260 information.

Intel Wireless-AC 7260

So, just some limited experience with an M11xR1 and a bit of info to start the ball rolling.

Update: As a footnote, I've just received an Intel wireless 6235 network adapter and tested it in an M11xR1 running Windows 7 Pro.

The Intel 6235 network adapter only seems to run Microsoft sourced driver 15.11.0.7 (26/01/2014) and couldn't get the latest Intel drivers to install.
Bluetooth module could not be accessed/installed on the M11xR1 using the Intel Wireless 6235 adapter.

The Intel wireless 6235 provides no benefits for myself over the Intel Wireless-AC 7260, where the 7260 does install the latest Intel drivers and thus reaps the benefits of any updates/fixes.

 

Thanks for the info, I'm planning to give it a try in the next few weeks.
I don't know for sure how the mini-pci lanes are wired in the R3, but I would really hope that the card isn't limited to USB 2.0 speeds. If/When I do get around to giving it a try I'll post some impressions of the process.

 

Just a quick update, the 7260-ac does work in the m11x r3. Windows 8 immediately connected to my network when I turned the machine on, didn't even need to change the driver.

Still have more extensive testing and driver updating to do once I have an actual 802.11ac network to test with, but at least its a plug and play upgrade.

 

So, I did a solid for the boys and girls.
Bought an ASUS RT-AC66U 802.11ac router.
I then Borg'd it with Shibby TomatoUSB fw which provides a raft of extra benefits for advance configuration.
Configured as 5GHz 80Mhz on channel 149

Using an Alienware M11xR1 with an Intel Wireless AC7260 card I am able to see a real 175Mbits/s which includes I/O overheads.
The card connects at 780Mbits, but as nice as that looks, it's never going to achieve that sort of real throughput as USB 2.0 has maximum 480Mbit limit anyway.

I'm basing my tests on the speed of a 150MB ftp download from my NAS.
I would still like to see 200Mbits/s( see update) via WiFi on a M11xR1, but given the hardware I'm using this may not be possible.
Mind you, that probably won't stop me 'tweaking' a few settings to see if I can glean a few more Mbits

Below is a display of the WiFi connection status and a 200MB SpeedTest file read/write.




Again, this supports the indication that an M11xR1 can get around 175Mbits/s throughput over 802.11ac which includes the read/write overheads of file transfer.
Really slow for 802.11ac, but not to bad for an olde M11xR1.

Update - I normally base my tests around a file download from my NAS, However it I do an ftp put (upload) I can see a bandwidth of 280Mbits/s.
This may give a better idea of the true speed of the 'network' component as the NAS it doing a cached write-back, which means the IO is transferred to the NAS memory and then as a secondary action within the NAS, written to HDD.

If doing a bandwidth test reading from a remote network device with an SSD and writing to a local SSD, then the bandwidth would probably be a lot higher. HDD add overheads to a given file transfer and thus cloud the true available bandwidth.

So this means if we take some of the file read/write IO out of the equation, we can see real bandwidth as high as 280Mbits/s.

That has got to be some good bandwidth for a circa 2010 M11xR1 over WiFi.