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Intel 7260HMW IEEE 802.11AC antenna compatibility


t0astm0nkey

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Hey team,

As soon as I get around to flashing my BIOS, I plan to buy the following wireless card:Newegg.com - Intel 7260HMW IEEE 802.11AC, dual-band, 2x2 Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 4.0 Mini PCI Express combo Adapter - 867 Mbps+300Mbps - Internal

Can anyone tell me if the 5GHz range will work with the existing antennas?

I've seen people upgrade to DualBand 802.11N cards, but can't find if anyone has confirmed that the 5GHz range actually works. 5GHz is necessary for 802.11ac.

Thanks in advance

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Interesting Question. I never gave much thought about WiFi design in notebooks, but I have seen a few designs of routers with WiFi.

The chip description states dual band capability, so the card should be capable of operation in the 5 GHz band. The device in question is your notebook or to be more precise your notebooks antenna(s)(I really hope you have more than one). For directed antennas you need different ones for the 2.4 GHz range and the 5 GHz range, however I do not think this is the case in most notebooks.

If different (directed) antennas were common in notebooks, the card needed separate connectors for the different antennas (groups). The card has a two antennas, but those are required by the MIMO technology in 802.11n devices to achieve the 300MB/s speed (2x 150 MB/s). The whole antenna/radio chain/spatial streams discussion is too complicated to be discussed here in full, but you will find plenty of interesting articles if you are interested.

Short:

I am pretty sure this will work and I wouldn't hesitate buying the card, as it costs only 30$. If the card doesn't work for some reason you can still sell it at the T|I Marketplace ;)

In any case sure you report back here.

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EDIT: Make sure to set your Roaming Aggressiveness to lowest so it would not cause spikes.

Are you referring to the drop in throughput when the card is scanning for other APs or have you discovered another effect here?

I am asking because my roaming Aggressiveness is set to Maximum to encourage switching between my different APs when I move to another room.

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Are you referring to the drop in throughput when the card is scanning for other APs or have you discovered another effect here?

I am asking because my roaming Aggressiveness is set to Maximum to encourage switching between my different APs when I move to another room.

It occassionally drops to 2 bars when it scans and that is a frequent issue. I fixed mine after setting it to lowest. You can also make it prefer a certain band as well, but I am not sure how well that works to lessen the spikes. Mines currently fixed with those settings.

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Hey team,

As soon as I get around to flashing my BIOS, I plan to buy the following wireless card:Newegg.com - Intel 7260HMW IEEE 802.11AC, dual-band, 2x2 Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 4.0 Mini PCI Express combo Adapter - 867 Mbps+300Mbps - Internal

Can anyone tell me if the 5GHz range will work with the existing antennas?

I've seen people upgrade to DualBand 802.11N cards, but can't find if anyone has confirmed that the 5GHz range actually works. 5GHz is necessary for 802.11ac.

Thanks in advance

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  • 1 month later...

Sorry about the delay. I changed jobs and got married, and mainly just forgot about the wireless card.

Anyways, as others have already pointed out, it does work: post-17011-14494996286181_thumb.jpg

- - - Updated - - -

And, I didn't notice this until I posted; It says "no internet connectivity" but certainly DOES connect to the internet.... not really sure what is going on with that

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Hey i'm quite new to changing these wireless cards. So how mouch trouble is it ?

I have a y410p and i ordered a ac 7260.

Any thoughts on how to replace, where is this card located?

The first thing that you'll need to do is mod your bios. I believe that this is still required.

It's easy to replace the wireless card. Just remove the bottom cover as you would to access the hard drive and ram.

You can find a pretty helpful dis-assembly video here on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmVYvJhlhL8

You only need to take off the bottom cover to expose the replaceable components so don't go taking the whole thing apart. The wireless card is in there. You can look at your new card to figure out what it looks like (more or less). Touch the chassis to discharge any static electricity before you touch electronic parts. You need to remove the screw that holds the mini pci express card in. Pay attention to which cable goes where on the existing wireless card. One is black and one is white. Then remove the old card.

Put the new wireless card (the Intel 7260) into the slot, screw it in and connect the old wires to the new card the same way they were connected to the old card. Button things back up and you should be good to go!

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Alright, well I just replaced my card about 10 minutes ago. I put everything in and the drivers installed correctly, but I couldn't connect to anything. I restarted my laptop and everything is working fine now, I guess the driver installation requires a reboot aswell.

Now I need to purchase an AC router.

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Have you noticed major improvements with the new card? I picked it up without realizing I needed to flash the bios so now while I see if I can get that done, I'm wondering if it's worth it to flash the bios or just return the card. I've been fairly disappointed in the wireless performance of the laptop (Although everything else has been fantastic with the laptop) but I'm not sure if it's a Windows 8/8.1 issue and nothing to do with the current adapter.

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Have you noticed major improvements with the new card? I picked it up without realizing I needed to flash the bios so now while I see if I can get that done, I'm wondering if it's worth it to flash the bios or just return the card. I've been fairly disappointed in the wireless performance of the laptop (Although everything else has been fantastic with the laptop) but I'm not sure if it's a Windows 8/8.1 issue and nothing to do with the current adapter.

It's totally worth it. There's a huge difference. The new bios and vbios offer improvements as well.

Do it! It's not hard.

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Have you noticed major improvements with the new card? I picked it up without realizing I needed to flash the bios so now while I see if I can get that done, I'm wondering if it's worth it to flash the bios or just return the card. I've been fairly disappointed in the wireless performance of the laptop (Although everything else has been fantastic with the laptop) but I'm not sure if it's a Windows 8/8.1 issue and nothing to do with the current adapter.

It is not a Windows 8 issue. First thing I did when I got this laptop was reformat the HDD and install a clean Windows 7 Professional. I still had the wireless issue. That is until I recently upgraded to the 7260ac.

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I suspect antennas tuned to 2.4GHz will be close enough to a multiple of frequencies used in the 5GHz band that it wont matter too much. Plus, the antennas are so close to other components in the laptop that a properly tuned antenna would go out of tune. The proper way of doing it would be to install two dual band antennas that are carefully tuned while IN the case. I'll bet most manufactures don't do that. I'll bet they simply buy something that will fit.

Careful antenna tuning is more important for higher end APs that can deal many clients that are relatively far away. My AP (A Mikrotik) has 2 radio cards with each having two antennas. One radio per band and antenna gains of 7Db. The focus is have a good AP, while the laptop/phone/tablet is focused on mobility and power.

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Do the drivers install automatically? Or am I going to have to download them before I put the new card in? I'm ordering the Y510p and this card later today, and I'd like to be prepared to do whatever I need to

Should be fine if you have Win8, not sure about Win7. Might as well get the latest drivers anyway though since apparently it fixes a problem with sleep.

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Do the drivers install automatically? Or am I going to have to download them before I put the new card in? I'm ordering the Y510p and this card later today, and I'd like to be prepared to do whatever I need to

drivers DO NOT install automatically on Win8.

make sure you download them prior to installing the card

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