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Networking

Intel Wi-Fi

8owners with an opinion
50%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and repairability; criticized for performance.

Models

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
I've had the same problem on generation after generation of Lenovo X1's...out of the box, the laptops always crash sometime after entry to sleep. It's inevitably the (Intel) wifi driver + modern standby, and it can be quite subtle to track down. On my current iteration (Lenovo P1 with Intel AX211), the failure also requires some other device to try to talk to the laptop while it's being put to sleep. Anecdotally sleep tends to fail harder/more often on public networks, perhaps because there's more adversarial traffic scanning computers and waking the device up. In the end, I really don't even understand why anyone would want their wifi driver responding to network packets when the device is asleep - given that these chips have DMA access via PCI to host memory (unless the IOMMU is configured, which is not a given) - this feature is equivalent to a persistent, always-on remote back door into your RAM, even when your machine is "off". Of course this requires an exploitable CVE in your wifi stack, but there is a constant stream of CVEs and obscure "remote management features", at least in the Intel drivers. My solution in the end has been to just remove the wifi module from the motherboard (or in cases when it's soldered down, disable the driver by deleting it entirely) and then use an external USB wifi dongle. It's been almost a year now and no sleep issues, no more randomly heating up my backpack, and in public environments like e.g. hotels I don't worry as much because I un…
Neutral
Your comment suggests that FreeBSD is a thing of a past and no longer capable of "quality networking", due to poor WiFi support. I can only agree with the poor WiFi support part. But WiFi is by no means something you can judge networking stack dedicated for servers. FreeBSD was never designed for consumer hardware networking. There were a few "desktop distros" but all have more or less died, and the few FreeBSD-based "storage distros" moved to Linux after FreeBSD changed its upstream for ZFS. And I'm saying this as someone who made a lot of effort to use FreeBSD on laptop over the years, and a current user of 15.0-CURRENT on ThinkPad. But FreeBSD was and is THE choice for high-bandwidth wired networking. Netflix is both an early adopter and an active contributor to FreeBSD's networking codebase. They hack FreeBSD[0] to achieve cool numbers over and over[1][2]. Intel's device mentioned by you - AX200 - works "fine" on my ThinkPad, for a few months now. The device was on supported hardware list for more than a year prior, but the actual driver wasn't covering all vendor/device id pairs (different flavors of hardware or behavior all known as "the same" chip; this is a major problem with consumer devies since chip outages started). That said, by "fine" I mean that I can use the card and finally can connect to 5GHz networks and avoid disruptions related to 2.4GHz congestion. But FreeBSD is still incapable of utilizing speeds offered by modern WiFi specifications. Even with 5GHz co…
Likes it
Anecdote: My employer recently bought me a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. Due to concussions and general flicker sensitivity, I don't do well with 60Hz screens, and I prefer AMD CPUs. This one came with a 240Hz screen. Overkill! But... Bluetooth was unreliable. Every few hours, it vanished from Windows as if it didn't exist. A moment of sleep and wake was enough to bring it back, but it was still annoying to lose mouse and headphones unexpectedly. Two support calls, but all they did was reinstall a bunch of the driver updates I had already reinstalled (and they installed Geforce Experience because Vantage said it was available.) Unsurprisingly, none of that fixed the issue. The next step was a factory reset and/or replacement, which would've been a big PITA because of time I already spent doing setup. And it still might not have solved the issue. Instead, I spent $23 on an Intel AX210 WLAN/Bluetooth chip, and performed the replacement (of a Realtek chip) in well under 10 minutes. Taking off the bottom panel was relatively easy, and I did not see any damaged clips. M.2 and SODIMM chips are readily replaceable, and so was this WLAN chip. It also fixed my problem completely without resorting to losing a lot of time repeating my setup. If there's a point, it's that budget and mid-range gaming laptops are often quite repairable, where as thin and light / ultrabooks, especially those made for businesses are much less frequently repairable. I think the reason is two-fold... in general busines…
Doesn’t like it
I've been using an AX210 on a Ryzen based laptop since early 2022. I initially had issues with it causing the laptop to lockup hard, if iwlwifi module (AX210 driver) was loaded, on resume from suspend to disk. It was easy to work around using a hook script to down the interface and unload the module before suspend, and reload + up interface if it had been up at time of suspend. S3 suspend to ram / resume worked fine without the hack. Currently 6.1 kernel (Debian testing). When I initially put the work around in place it was IIRC 5.6 kernel, so maybe not an issue anymore, but haven't bothered checking to see. I only bought an Intel AX210 because it was cheapest tri-band card. The Intel card is pretty gimped (broken AP modes, breakage due to issues "magically" determining regulatory domain, Intel removed functionality in recent driver versions that could somewhat work around the first two issues so now impossible to mitigate, etc.). I would probably try a Mediatek card, if doing this today (in spite of my general policy of avoiding Mediatek). Last I checked, the equivalent Atheros chipset still had poor free driver support?!
Likes it
In my experience Intel wifi, specifically in laptops, has been far and away the best wireless experience I've had on both Windows and Linux. I do not see how Intel's Linux support is second rate, Intel's Linux wifi team is very active and always has solid support for hardware before it is shipped. A big frustration with Qualcomm wifi on Windows has been that they do not provide driver downloads to end users. If you are using a laptop that has been abandoned by the OEM and you have a wifi driver problem you have to hunt for the driver on sketchy 3rd party sites or just live with it. I have personally had to help several people find drivers because ancient Qualcomm drivers were causing bug checks on power state transitions. What real-world experiences have you had with Intel wifi on Linux and Windows that make you believe it is second rate?
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Microsoft isn't in charge of this though. It's the wifi card vendors. I wouldn't be surprised if this is Intel shenanigans because they have always segmented their OS driver support dating back to Windows 7. Anything from laptop gpu drivers not getting updates after 2 years to chipsets suddenly failing the compatibility mode flags on newer windows that has never changed since older windows. Intel just literally doesn't care. They shovel their crap out.