Is the Intel 4965AGN wireless card compatible with the HEL80?

Hi guys, I'm just curious I think this would be a sweet upgrade plus a great alternative to actually getting a wireless N card. So what do you think?

 

or would I need some sort of a 3 antenna mod?

 

Right, you need three antennas for the N-standard, if you don't have such an third antenna, you could use your 3945 with the same effect.

 

I just got myself a Znote 2425W = Compal EL80 notebook, and it came standard with the Intel 4965AGN wireless card. Can however not test the N network element, as I do not have an N-AccessPoint.

 

Hey Mr.Bean do you know if your znote has a 3 antenna setup or if it just uses 2. I read somewhere that the dell notebooks that have the 4965 use the 2 from the previous 3945 setup?

 

Don't know EL80, but my EL81 has only two antennas preinstalled.

 

Any feedback on this? I'm looking to upgrade to a wireless N router, and I'm wondering if I can run a wireless N card with two antennae (or install a third) and get Wireless N speeds.

 

Unfortunately you cannot get 'n' performance from an 'n' card installed in your PowerPro L 8:15 (Compal HEL80) because the Intel 945 chipset does not support it, and you only have 2 antenna leads. The card will work, but only in a/b/g, not 'n'.

 

What? Wi-Fi isn't depending on chipset in any way. I wouldn’t buy pre n though, and dance around making it work properly with pre n routers. All these drafts are horrible incompatible.
You need to get third antenna or a thin electric cable inside notebook case and make it spread a little through it, everything should work fine.

 

Sorry Dirt, but the Intel 945 chipset does not support the 3 leads necessary for the draft 'n' standard...therefore the chipset does not support 'n'. You will not see 'n' supported on any laptop with the Intel 945 chipset.

 

Hmmm.... so you need three antennas to run the n-standard?
Unfortunately I can confirm that only two antennas are connected to my intel n-card, inside the laptop, and the middle antenna socket on the wireless card is empty.

How does the chipset influence the wireless capabilities, when there are a seperate wireless network card?

 

Without the 3rd lead you will only get a/b/g performance from the card, you will not get the additional speed or range of the 'n' standard.

The 965 chipset is the first chipset to support the 'n' standard as well, any previous chipset does not support it.

Research it yourself on the Intel website.

 

Ok, I'll clear this up a bit. For I am lucky owner of both HEL80 and IFL90 laptops I can compare them side by side.
The object to study was Intel 4965AGN MM2 draft n card. In IFL90 it was connected to all 3 antennas as it should be and HEL80 to only 2! Unfortunately the version I have is EL80 and it hasn't got any TV Tuner slot and there is no spare antenna in the case, otherwise I could simply borrow to connect antenna from TV Tuner. But as the further test will show there is absolutely no need in third antenna with modern Draft N routers since they don't use up all Draft N potential! The router used was D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router.
I run a simple file copy test on both laptops to see the difference in bandwidth. The file used in test was SILICON_OPTIX_1_4.iso - 2 178 912KB. The file was transferred from the home server with integrated gigabit adapter from Realtek (the same one that is used in EL80).
Chipset driver version on both platforms was 8.3.0.1018 and Wi-Fi driver - 11.5.0.32, the latest to the date.
First IFL90 performance:

The time to copy the file was 5m 20s, that makes average 6809KB/s of useful data bandwidth or approximately 53.2mbps.

Ok, now it's time to move up to H/EL80:

And... WFT?! The bandwidth has actually improved a bit! I'll defiantly study this matter further in the future, but meanwhile let’s look at the test results.
The time to copy the file was 4m 40s, that makes average 7782KB/s of useful data bandwidth or approximately 60.8mbps! That is 114.3% of bandwidth IFL90 provided. Quite a big improvement I must say.

Lastly I decided to add G standard file copy test with the equal test stand:

The time to copy the file was 14m 05s, that makes average 2579KB/s of useful data bandwidth or approximately 20.1mbps.

Conclusion:
1) Though Draft N isn't 6 times faster as it advertised to be compared to G it's nevertheless a big improvement. Providing 3 times faster bandwidth G offer Draft N can let you do almost anything without need of getting wired, even such large bandwidth required tasks as Blue Ray video streaming from the network Blue Ray ROM can be performed without any difficulties.
2) H/EL80 proved to be absolutely compatible with Intel's Santa Rosa’s Draft N wireless adapter 4965AGN. And even if you can't get the third antenna it'll most likely work as well without it.

P.S. I didn't force adapter in HEL80 to use Draft N standard for connection, it was set by the default.

Update:
Time has passed and some changes have happened. I moved to Vista 64bit, the Intel wireless driver was updated till version 11.5.1.2 and the firmeware on D-Link DIR-655 router was upgraded till 1.12 beta. Looks like the results have changed a bit too:

Time to copy: 4m 02s
Avarage bandwidth: ~ 70.5mbps

 

Excellent post dirt, thankyou!