How to choose a new WiFi card for laptop?

Hello, techs!
I have an older laptop (Acer Predator PH317-52) that has a dual-band Intel Wireless-AC 9560NGW M.2 (E-Key) wireless card, and the damn thing isn't working properly. It's actually a WiFi/Bluetooth combo, but I never use bluetooth. Anyway, I'm just about fed up with this card and want to replace it since the wifi connection is unstable on both bands (2.4 and 5 GHz), and on Windows and Linux. I've tested it on three different WiFi routers with the similar results while other devices connect to the same WiFi just fine. Google says a lot of people have been having problems with this particular card. I need some advice what to choose since my knowledge about hardware is lacking. I hope I'm not overthinking this, but it's something I've never done before, and the task seems to be more complex than it should be. Why? Well...

BIOS whitelists
I know some manufacturers use hardware whitelists and refuse to boot the device, if an "unsupported" card is detected. I'm not sure about Acer, but I read somewhere that they are among less-restrictive brands. Are bios whitelists still a thing today? I kind of don't want to do any bios modding.

Compatibility
I heard some manufacturers implement some vendor-specific things in their hardware, which may include functionality in the WiFi card itself. I'm not sure, if installing a 3rd party card could break something, but I'd like to be careful. I actually already tried using a spare M.2 WiFi card (Intel Wireless AC 7265) that I salvaged from another device. The laptop booted fine (card wasn't rejected by BIOS), but the PCIe bus started spewing out a ton of AER [8086:a336] errors like RxErr, BadDLLP and Timeout in the linux syslog, so I had to remove the card. I need a card that works with the current system.

Antenna compatibility
The current card was a dual-band (2.4/5GHz) AC card. The laptop antennas are probably designed with this in mind. Would a 802.11n or a 802.11ax WiFi card be compatible with the same antennas or do such cards need different antenna design?

Driver support

I know that Atheros chipsets were a good pick back in the days (10 to 25 years ago), but I have no idea what's trending today. I need something with decent driver support on Windows 10 and Linux.

Do you have any suggestions for a brand or model?

I kind of want to avoid Intel since 2 cards didn't work already.

Has to fit into a M.2 slot, size 2230, E-key.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Found something very closely related to this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

Edited by Vectron, 04 February 2024 - 04:59 PM.

A question : Acer Predator PH317-52 have you installed your Motherboard drivers from the Support Page and then stopped using CCleaner if are using it.  ??

Since without a key we can not access your Support Page have you checked the pages for help regarding this issue.

Your simplest solution is to disconnect or disable your in-built card and use a USB wifi dongle. These are not particularly expensive and fairly widely available. I have always used one in my desktop because I have never yet had a desktop with a built-in wifi card and my experience has been good. Most of my experience has been with the small TP-Link dongles and in about 25 years I have only had one fail.

Chris Cosgrove

Pkshadow: I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your post. I've never used ccleaner, and I never installed drivers from the support page, at least not on Linux. The drivers (iwlwifi) come automatically included with the latest linux kernel. I am on Xubuntu 22.04 LTS. Though, I do use dual-boot Windows 10 where I think I've installed the latest drivers from the Intel website since those seemed to be the most stable of all that I tried. That was on an old test installation, I later formatted and reinstalled Windows with only the Intel drivers.

Chris Cosgrove: That's what I'm doing right now or at least until I buy a new M.2 card for my laptop. I was just about to go buy 3 random M.2 cards from amazon, and hope that one of them would work, but then I came across that Wikipedia article that I linked in first post. It seems that the AC 9560 is actually a CNVi card, and I'll have to be careful what I buy because a CNVi card is apparently not compatible with CNVio2 and vice-versa. Also, CNVio/2 require some specific PCH/CPU in order to work - for CNVi it's a gen 8 or 9 Intel processor. I'm currently looking at Intel AX200, which is a CNVi card, and apparently using existing AC WiFi antennas is fine for AX cards. I wonder, if a classic PCIe M.2 card would work in a CNVi-enabled M.2 slot?

But yeah, I guess Acer Support may know more about this. Gonna do some more research, brb.

EDIT: AX200 is not CNVio

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/99446/intel-wirelessac-9560/specifications.html

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/189347/intel-wifi-6-ax200-gig/specifications.html

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/130293/intel-wifi-6-ax201-gig/specifications.html

Edited by Vectron, 05 February 2024 - 04:31 AM.

Just a quick update, I bought an Intel AX200 WiFi/BT card and tried it out. The card is detected in both Windows and Linux, but there are some problems with it - on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (kernel 5.15) the WiFi seems stable, but the Bluetooth crashes as soon as I enable it... might need to try a newer kernel? On Windows the WiFi on 2.4GHz band seems ok, but the connection on 5GHz band is very unstable (even with the latest Intel driver manually installed). Seems to start working again, if I limit the channel bandwidth to 20MHz in the driver advanced tab. Haven't tested BT yet.

I also bought a second M.2 WiFi card (AW-CB375NF) which uses a RTL8822CE chipset, and it doesn't get detected at all. No idea, if its a faulty card or the laptop doesn't support non-Intel hardware.