Review on 🔌 AC1200 Dual Band Wireless-AC PCIe WiFi Card for Windows 7 8 10 - Supports WiDi, Wi-Fi Direct, Miracast, WMM, WPS, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, BT 4.2 - PCIe Express Card with 1200Mbps Speed by Shane Minter

I was a bit concerned when ordering at an unknown Fenvi company that it may be fake and poor performance. However the product was as described and worked well on two Dell servers both running Arch Linux with kernel 4.9.41-1-lts. Note that this PCIe card with antennas is only a few dollars more than an Intel 8265 card.) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 0050 Flags: Bus Master, Fast Devsel, Latency 0, IRQ 32 Prefetch) [Size=8K] Capabilities: [ c8] Power Management Version 3 Capabilities: [d0 ] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [40] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Extended Capabilities Error Reporting Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 34 - 13-e8-ff-ff-5a-01-ef Capabilities: [14c] Latency Tolerance Report Capabilities: [154] L1 PM Substates Kernel Driver Used: iwlwifi Kernel Modules: iwlwifi As you can see it uses the built iwlwifi driver into the kernel and requires the appropriate Intel firmware, so install the Linux firmware using your distribution's package manager. Environment 1 I first tested this card on my machine. in very difficult conditions for the 5g band, one floor up and several walls away from the Ubiquity AC Pro Wireless Access Point. At first I only connected to wireless N, but with a full 300Mbps rating on the 2.4g band. I have another device connected as AC but the speed never exceeded N so I knew the AC signal was at least available. probably on average in the range of 500-550 Mbps. To achieve this I had to configure one setting on the PCIe card and a few on my access point. 1) At the access point I had to reduce the output power in the 2.4g band and the maximum power in the 5g band. These changes allowed the card to lock onto an AC signal rather than just wireless N in the 2.4G band antenna aggregation on the PCIe card. These two optimizations delivered very acceptable performance in this environment. Wednesday 2 After writing the map for a few days, I moved the map to a server in a different location with a wall + partial wall between the server and the Ubiquity AC Pro wireless access point. This time without settings for any device. I immediately found an average connection of 600 Mbit/s. I just changed the power supply of the 5g radio on the access point and connected to 780Mbps straight away. Connection speed varied, but was always 650 Mbps or higher. I then turned on the antenna aggregation and while I never got past the 780Mbps mark without tuning, the speed seemed to stay close to that high mark more consistently. I am very happy with the Fenvi card. Ubiquity AC Pro is a 3x3 11AC MIMO access point serving 8-10 other wireless clients in both environments. I haven't tested the Fenvi in an unobstructed environment where performance should improve. Also, the nature of the location of the antennas in relation to other possible electromagnetic interference from the server itself can be harmful. If I had an extension, I would test the antenna a little farther from the server. Intel drivers make it easy to install on Linux, which is why I chose this card. I would recommend this card for modern Linux kernels. Addendum: my biggest headache. This card is great but will drive you crazy if you install it on a Dell T130 server as the fan speed keeps ramping up to full speed and none of the firmware settings in the Bios/iDrac GUI allow you to override your fans to make it turn normal, quiet level. Don't despair. First, it has nothing to do with this particular card. Any third party PCIe card inserted into this server will cause the same problem. To solve this you need to install the Dell Open Manage tools and run the following command: racadm set System.ThermalSettings.ThirdPartyPCIFanResponse 0 I just saved you at least a day and a handful of hair :)