Hacker News Reader

Comment by RedShift1 | Hacker News Reader

I've been buying laptops with AMD CPU's but they always come with these trash MediaTek RZ616 Wi-Fi cards, why is that? I've been replacing them with Intel Wi-Fi cards, now I have a pile of RZ616 cards ready to become future microplastics :-(

View on HN

Intel sells two versions of their WiFi cards: ones ending in 1 use CNVI protocol and work only with Intel chips. These are sold really cheap to OEMs; ones ending in 0 use standard PCIe and are sold to OEMs for ~$10 more.

AMD decided to brand Mediatek's MT7921 and MT7922 as RZ608 and RZ616 to have something to sell to OEMs at the same price point as Intel's xx1 chips.

Lenovo grew unhappy with MediaTek as well and started soldering down Qualcomm chips for WLAN on their AMD platforms only to be burned by buggy firmware/driver interactions on Linux (which they officially sell and support). And Qualcomm stretches themselves rather thin on the mainline kernel side once a chipset generation is no longer the latest. It takes a tremendous amount of vendor pressure to make Qualcomm do anything these days.

iwlwifi has its own set of problems, biggest being no AP mode (on 5 Ghz). Also intels firmware license is more restrictive than mediateks, and being fullmac the firmware does lot more of the heavy lifting; I personally prefer softmac more. There simply aren't that many great options out there, gone are the golden days of ath9k.

Have you tried them further than "I don't trust MediaTek"?

I've had sequentially an Intel and an AMD ThinkPad for work (I killed the first one). Turns out, the wifi is much much better on the AMD one with the MediaTek chipset than on the Intel one with the Intel chipset. On the latter, I had very frequent disconnects from the network (severals per hour) along with atrocious latency even on 5GHz. And by atrocious latency, I mean atrocious as in "it is more than noticeable when using ssh". The current one has been rock solid for the past two or three years.

So yeah, I guess it really depends. The specific chipset I have is a MT7921 and I'm running Linux, YMMV. And it also may depend on the laptop itself.

The laptops run Windows. It's not about trust, they just don't work well. They take a long time to connect, particularly after returning from sleep. Many times I have to disconnect and reconnect manually after returning from sleep. I replace them with Intel Wi-Fi ones and it just works. I'd really rather just replace them than face user complaints.

Urgh. Kudos to you, that’s no easy task. And this might explain a lot, I’ve never liked the WiFi experience in windows. I find Linux with IWD to be stable as hell

You get what you pay for.

You know why. Price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com