Intel WiFi 6 AX200 Card

[Carbo]

Looking at buying the Intel Wifi 6 AX200 card. Looking online I see it is only available from Ebay sellers, all located in China. Color me skeptical when it comes to buying crap from Ebay. Are these cards legit or are they knock offs? And why are there no known and trusted sellers offering this card? Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, etc. . .

 

[mxnerd]

Because they are produced in China and they are OEM products that should be used in laptops, which also mostly assembled/manufactured in China, it's not for US resale or for US consumers.

eBay sellers who have good ratings would be fine. These products should be legit.

 

[Carbo]

Interesting. I didn't know they were OEM only. I'll take a look at Ebay, then. Thank you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why would Intel make their first AX wifi mPCI-E card, OEM-only? I can understand demand from OEMs, but wouldn't there be demand for it for upgrades from people that already own laptops? Doesn't make much sense to me. Oh well, ebay, here I come. Would like to upgrade some of my laptops too, eventually I'm getting an AX/WPA3 router. Maybe a Netgear, they seem to be out ahead in that dept. Asus has an AX router, but no WPA3 yet on it that I've seen. Maybe they'll release a WPA3 update for a whole bunch of their routers at once, including the AC66U, AC68U-family, and AC86U. (Thinking of upgrading to a brand-new AC86U soon, if if has a WPA3 update, otherwise I'm going all-out with an AX router.)

(I really don't use wifi for much, mostly 2.4Ghz wifi for my older lower-end laptops, that only have 2.4Ghz cards. I also use the 5Ghz AC wifi as a "backup mode" for my gigabit LAN wired desktops, if the LAN goes down for some reason.)

 

[mxnerd]

Why would Intel make their first AX wifi mPCI-E card, OEM-only? I can understand demand from OEMs, but wouldn't there be demand for it for upgrades from people that already own laptops?

You should know there are very few people doing upgrades for their own laptops.

Most consumers will just buy new laptops and throw away or sell their old ones.

==

A quick search on eBay shows that most INTEL AX200 adapters are M.2(NGFF) format. Not mini PCIe.

 

[Carbo]

Ordered a pair of the AX200 cards. $28 for both, inc delivery. Good deal. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Now if only I hadn't stripped that @%@% screw holding the mPCI-E wifi card in, in my Lenovo laptop, I would consider upgrading that one too. (Well, I have two of them, perhaps I'll try upgrading one of them. I think that Lenovo may have a BIOS white-list though.)

 

[mxnerd]

mini PCIe <> M.2, the interface is different.

Make sure you have M.2 slot before you buy.

There are no mini PCIe AX200 adapters on eBay yet.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My bad, you're right, I think most modern wifi cards are M.2 these days, A+E key, right?

 

[mxnerd]

Yeah. It looks like it's all A-E key.

AX200 does support 3 types of interfaces: M.2 , mPCIe and USB

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189347/intel-wi-fi-6-ax200.html

You just have to wait for vendors to come out with the later 2 interfaces.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Thanks. Looking on ebay, there are some vendors with adapted AX200 cards, with a PCI-E x1 connector card, that will plug into a desktop PC. Might get a few of those. Then again, I hardly use wifi, and my current board, an AORUS PRO WIFI has Intel wifi, but I don't think that it's the new AX200 generation.

 

[mxnerd]

The WiFi on your AORUS board is intel 802.11ac wave 2.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Hi! Anyone had problems with their AX200 cards yet? I have one in my x570 Aorus Master and it's not always such a great card.

When I can get it to work on 5G it's fantastic. I've gotten over 300 MB/s to my router in the next room (an old 6300v2; actually it's another router with 6300v2 firmware flashed onto it but whatever, same hardware). It's over 2x faster than the AC wifi NIC from my x370 Taichi, and I'm not even using the AX standard. Then it just starts dropping packets like mad. I have no idea why. The 2.4 GHz band works "okay" but it's quite slow. It's reliable, just depressing in its performance. Maybe 25 Mbps?

I thought it might be the router going out, but it doesn't seem to be the case. The "guest computer" which sits right next to the router is normally hooked up by a patch cable, but I took it off the patch cable and let it use its integrated AC nic. It got around 240 Mbps less (which is sad, considering the computer is less than 5 feet away from the router) but had no connectivity issues or packet loss at all. The router seems to be handling the connection just fine. I also did not encounter this problem over a month ago when I was still using my x370 Taichi and its AC NIC.

Updating the driver to the latest from 7/22 (which is 21.40.0.1) appears to have alleviated the problem somewhat, though I have still had some packet loss and "general failure" messages when trying to ping anything, even the router itself!

What do you think could be the problem? Part of me thinks its that the new NIC is trying to connect at higher speeds and is choking on interference on the 5 GHz band from nearby homes. That's a bit of a stretch, but still, there have been more and more APs appearing on my available list this year. I think the total number of APs I can access has doubled since January. Again, the AC NIC in my Taichi had no trouble on the 5 GHz band. Not sure why this new NIC is experiencing difficulty.

The other weird thing is that the failures seem to come at specific times. Like when I make HTML requests. I have ping -t 10.0.0.4 (local IP for the guest computer) running right now, for example. Uninterrupted for a few minutes. When I open up a tab in my browser and go to google.com for a simple search, the ping starts to experience general failure while the HTML request to google.com gets hung up on a TLS handshake. Then the handshake resolves and the pingflood goes back to normal. What gives? I never encounter that using the 2.4 GHz band, and I never had that problem with my old AC NIC.

edit: in fact, this problem seems to be exclusive to web browser activity . . . I need to see if I get it under Edge as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Was it just the AT forums? Or was it every site? Because I've had that problem, in the past, accessing specifically, the AT forums, from Linux, over wifi. Wired was fine. Windows was fine. A Windows VM inside Linux was fine. But using Linux directly? Like watching grass grow, loading pages.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@VirtualLarry

No, it's every site. I haven't tested the 5 GHz band extensively with non-HTTPS traffic, but HTTPS traffic seems to be driving this NIC nuts. Well using the 5 GHz band anyway. I'm mystified by it. Also it did happen under Edge so it's not specific to Waterfox.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Apparently it's a software (read: driver) problem. Digging through Events Viewer, it looks like the driver is repeatedly finding internal errors in the hardware and resetting itself. Over, and over, and over again. That is causing the packet loss/"General failure". It only does this in 5 GHz mode. Seems to be a common problem with this adapter. It may be only doing it in AC mode @ 5 GHz. Intel's own forum has numerous posts about this problem, with various Intel reps deflecting on the issue.

"We won't support you since your laptop OEM didn't put it on their hardware list"

"That version of Windows isn't supported"

etc. I think maybe one guy got a semi-serious response since he had a motherboard with an AX200 in it (like me) and was running Win10 1903 (unlike me). But I don't think they have yet managed to help him solve his problem.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So is the AX200 card, hardware-bugged, in 5Ghz AC mode? That would be... unfortunate. Not outside the realm of possibility though.

 

[mxnerd]

Apparently INTEL does not expect that you use these OEM parts to be used on consumer's own motherboard/laptop.

https://forums.intel.com/s/question...tel-ax200-cant-connect-to-5ghz?language=en_US

https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P00004QgMYGSA3/intel-ax200-brechung-bei-5ghz?language=en_US

 

[DrMrLordX]

So is the AX200 card, hardware-bugged, in 5Ghz AC mode? That would be... unfortunate. Not outside the realm of possibility though.

Possibly. Not everyone is having the same problem. It's almost always related to the driver constantly resetting the device, so unless someone figures out why that's happening, not much else can be said. It could be 100% a software flaw.

Apparently INTEL does not expect that you use these OEM parts to be used on consumer's own motherboard/laptop.

https://forums.intel.com/s/question...tel-ax200-cant-connect-to-5ghz?language=en_US

https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P00004QgMYGSA3/intel-ax200-brechung-bei-5ghz?language=en_US

Yeah I'm not impressed with their responses. At least some of the people complaining on the Intel forum indicate that older driver versions from earlier this year did work, and that later driver revisions are not working so well. Thanks to MS' aggressive policy of updating drivers in the background, it's nearly impossible to use old drivers.

Ironically, Intel should be supporting me since I am using the product in an intended application - namely, my x570 Aorus Master. But I'm also in the Windows Insider fast ring, so they won't support me, never mind that Intel is apparently supplying new versions of their AX200 driver directly to MS. I have a driver version that is newer than the one that is available from Intel's own site. I have another update in the pipeline, so I'm curious as to whether anything will change. I'm also wondering if the same problems occur when using my AX200 card in AX mode rather than AC. Haven't got the router hardware right now to test that.

At least it works well on the 2.4 GHz band.

 

[mxnerd]

Ironically, Intel should be supporting me since I am using the product in an intended application - namely, my x570 Aorus Master.

OK, so this card came with the motherboard? Did you tell INTEL's support? You probably also should contact GIGABYTE for support and use their driver.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-MASTER-rev-10/support#support-dl-driver-wlanbt

And if I were you, I'll opt out insider program, unless you are a developer.

 

[DrMrLordX]

OK, so this card came with the motherboard? Did you tell INTEL's support? You probably also should contact GIGABYTE for support.

I haven't contacted Gigabyte or Intel about it yet. Trying to grab as much data as I can from outside sources first.

And if I were you, I'll opt out insider program, unless you are a developer.

I have my reasons for wanting to run it. For the most part, I like what I get. Upon rare occasion it creates headaches, such as when I had a VegaFE in my system. That was annoying.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Update!

First off, I reported my issue with the AX200 + driver 21.40.0.1 to MS through Feedback Hub. One of the reasons why I like being in the fast ring is that when I report stuff like this at least vaguely related to OS updates, I get fixes, even if they're only partial ones. MS helped me (or put a bug in AMD's ear) about the problems VegaFE had when updating Win10 to a new OS version and some other crap. But I digress.

One other problem I've had with my AX200 is that getting the driver version I want running on the NIC has proven . . . difficult. For example, I think updating do a new fast ring version automatically sticks 21.40.0.1 on the NIC. I recall not having many problems with the AX200 in 5 GHz mode until after I updated my OS (which happens frequently). But when I tried installing anything other than 21.40.0.1, MS would just plunk that driver version back on anyway.

However, by some bizarre magic, I managed to uninstall and delete 21.40.0.1 and the OS defaulted to 21.30.0.2 which I was never able to install successfully. I tried running the software installer, I tried installing using the raw drivers + .inf (basically the admin distro) . . . nothing worked. And then magically, after I did an uninstall/delete of 21.40.0.1 just now, 21.30.0.2 popped up to replace it. Weird stuff. I kind of wish the OS would just give me a drop-down box of every available driver on the system/Internet and let me pick the one I want.

Anyway, there's good and bad to it. The bad is I can still replicate the driver failure/device reset problem I had earlier. The good is that it seems to do less to cripple the device. Instead of the connection shutting down for minutes on end, it seems like it blips for maybe a millisecond or so. I'll have to test it more-extensively to see if it's liveable. Thus far my attempts to install the old driver Gigabyte gave me with the board have failed, and I'm a little afraid of just outright deleting 21.30.0.2 right now since I might want it back in case the older driver proves to be worse. And of course I'll be back on 21.40.0.1 on the next update unless MS just pulls the driver entirely. Which I'm sort of hoping they do.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Looked on the Windows Driver Library site, for updated, or even, back-rev drivers for that card?

 

[IntelUser2000]

Why would Intel make their first AX wifi mPCI-E card, OEM-only? I can understand demand from OEMs, but wouldn't there be demand for it for upgrades from people that already own laptops? Doesn't make much sense to me.

Most people do not have the knowledge to even upgrade RAM on their desktop PCs. Of those that can, those who can upgrade modern laptop Wi-Fi is probably a fraction of that.

Let's say there were 1 million users of computers in 1984. Back then things were more technical, problems more common, so pretty much all 1 million people had to be very techical and knowledge.

In 2019, I think there's 3 billion of them. It's possible that the amount of people who are technical hasn't grown since since 1984. Now you have much more larger user base and with vastly varying skill levels.



I have the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 6250 for Desktop card. I wonder if I can swap that for the 9260 or even AX200? The thing is on a PCB with its own M.2 interface like on most laptops.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Looked on the Windows Driver Library site, for updated, or even, back-rev drivers for that card?

Nah, I snagged some old drivers from Gigabyte, but getting them installed is a headache. Looks like I would have to delete 21.30.0.2 to get them active, which I'm squeemish about doing since I am not 100% sure how I got those installed in the first place.

Further testing (playing TF2) indicates that the 5 GHz band is more functional than before, but it can lead to janky gameplay in things like fps titles. Every 10-20 minutes I get some hitching for about 15-30 seconds and then it goes back to normal. Still better than before, but not exactly ideal.