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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

Is there any hope for the wifi bugs mentioned in the article?

I was trying to avoid reviews like this because I didn't want to be thinking about all the problems instead of looking forward to my new laptop.

I am now wondering if I should have gone Intel.

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As the original poster noted, this seems to be an interaction between the specific access point or router and the AMD RZ616 driver, and not something that other users are seeing on their home networks.

The RZ616 is AMD's rebrand of MediaTek MT7921K. Mediatek does have a dedicated team working on Linux drivers, but we haven't seen their or AMD's plans: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/mediatek

All of that said, 13th Gen Intel Core and specifically Intel AX210 WiFi are quite mature in Linux, and Ryzen 7040 U-series and RZ616 are quite new. All indications and communication we've had with AMD point to them having a strong desire to deliver a great Linux experience.

So my Framework laptop is currently in transit. In theory, I would just swap the AMD wifi card with an 25 euro Intel AX210?

Try the card first but yes, you can do that.

Yep this should be possible AIUI funnily enough, it is not possible on the Intel models.

You can also replace the MediaTek RZ616 with a Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 card, which is equally supported by AMD and default on their Ryzen Pro models. I’m very happy with mine, got it from eBay.

You are probably in a better place than me to really push them on Linux support.

Mediatek's Linux support seems reasonable, but I've only had experience running the AP cards in OpenWRT, not the little baby client cards.

FWIW I use my MT7921K as an access point. It can only do one frequency at a time (2.4/5/6GHz), and I haven't tested the 6GHz capabilities, but I've not had much trouble with it so far.

Do Intel or AMD forbid you from mixing and matching wifi cards ? Why the unnecessary fragmentation ?

There is no specific commercial restriction preventing us from mixing and matching, but there is also no commercial/technical support from either party around the mixed solution. That means that if any issues come up, we have no path to resolving them, including crucially if we ran into issues during RF certifications.

iirc Intel has a line of cards that only work on their CPU lines and otherwise, Intel seems to have soft blocked their compatible cards from OEMs - we can't get AMD laptops with Intel nics anymore where I work from all vendors.

Otherwise nope - I run Intel ax cards in all of my laptops (HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, surface laptop 4 -- came with Intel) and they are solid in windows and Linux.

> Intel has a line of cards that only work on their CPU lines

Intel sells CNVi versions of their WiFi module lineups that only work on chipsets that support it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

I bought MT7921K on a PCIe card for two older PCs and they work fine, AX210 is better but Mediatek is not bad - between two of them on 6GHz they managed >1Gbps and didn't lock up at all even after 200GB.

Just had to use at least Linux 6.1 or newer and had to set regulator domain manually... Compiling upstream mt76 enabled even more stability and also enabled AP+STA operation.

i've got the Intel AX210 WiFi/BT (bundled with asrock b650e pg-itx). as for WiFi it worked out of box, but the drivers for BT are horrible, some of my devices aren't recognized (while bt-usb dongle works fine), and there are plenty of other issues like disconnecting or buffering keystrokes from keyboard.. so i've had to disable the Intel AX210 combo in bios, to keep my system stable. for the WiFi part it's ok, otherwise i'd recommend to wait for better BT support on linux.

i feel like the wifi issues are kind of overblown, i mean 300 down is still blazing fast -- but that is just my usage

Yeah exactly. Like it sucks because I have 6E and it can’t really use it, but it’s only a big deal when transferring large files on my network.

I wonder if this could be due to regulatory domain at all?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration/Wirel...

6E didn't work on my Elitebook until I set it from global to my local country. But completely different WiFi chip.

I currently get 600 using an Intel AX201 card and 900 from a better router.

The intel stack is more mature right now as someone pointed out in the comments above. Down the road AMD will get better with better drivers and newer chips. If wifi speeds matter to someone and they are upgrading from an older intel board then keeping the old wifi card would make sense as of now.

I don’t want to sway people from the WiFi issues.

I saw others in the forums without problems.

I can definitely say for sure, I ran at least 20 speed tests between it and two phones in the same locations and had much lower bandwidth on it.

Hoping this is just an amd issue that will get better.

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