review of INTEL® WIRELESS-AC 9260/9560?

[escape75]

I don’t know about the 9260, but I know the 8260 and 8265
have huge issues with the rt-ac1900p (probably same with the
rt-ac68u I imagine) when you connect using 2.4 ghz band.

I tried 2 different laptops with 2 different cards, and 2 different
routers (same model) and both had major connection issues.

It seems sometimes the default gateway goes unreachable,
and sometimes you can have a background download which
will be going fine, but any new website requests to some sites
will fail for 20 seconds, and then it will fix itself.

This is all while windows reports a perfect signal to the router.

I’ve reported to Intel and they are looking at this, on forums.

I've tried windows resets, reinstalls, many driver versions, all same ...

It’s also interesting same laptop works fine on 2.4 ghz with a rt-n66u

 

[Grisu]

I don’t know about the 9260, but I know the 8260 and 8265
have huge issues with the rt-ac1900p (probably same with the
rt-ac68u I imagine) when you connect using 2.4 ghz band.

I tried 2 different laptops with 2 different cards, and 2 different
routers (same model) and both had major connection issues.

It seems sometimes the default gateway goes unreachable,
and sometimes you can have a background download which
will be going fine, but any new website requests to some sites
will fail for 20 seconds, and then it will fix itself.

This is all while windows reports a perfect signal to the router.

I’ve reported to Intel and they are looking at this, on forums.

I've tried windows resets, reinstalls, many driver versions, all same ...

It’s also interesting same laptop works fine on 2.4 ghz with a rt-n66u

Thanks for your testing with different laptops and routers!

I have exactly the same issues with this AC8265 but even bit less with 7265.
And my routers are RT-AC68U and RT-AC86U, where 86U seems to have even more problems.
2.4G is just pausing transmission for many seconds, up and down, but down even worse.
After resetting all (PC and router or only the cards and WiFi) it starts with full speed for short time and going down more and more to 1Mb/s or even timeouts.

Both 8265 and 7265 in laptop are more stable with shorter pausing than in PC with PCIe adapter.

At the end not usable for 2.4G while 5G pretty fine.

@ADMIN: could you please moove this thread to a more proper category?

 

[sfx2000]

Also, switching cards isn't always possible. A lot of laptop manufacturers implement whitelists in the BIOS to only allow very specific cards, unfortunately.

There's dependencies also on the chipset with Intel cards - esp the newer ones, as they're starting to offload some of the effort on to the PCH...

Swapping from a 31xx series to a 72xx series makes sense, as they're essentially the same chip, just one is 2*2:2...

 

[sfx2000]

The QCA WiFi/BT solutions are not integrated yet into QCOM's SnapDragon chips

Correction here - some of the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips for mobile/android - they have integrated WiFi/BT into the SoC - easiest way to tell on PCAP's is that Atheros has their OUI's, and the Snapdragon integrated WiFi/BT shows up with a Qualcomm OUI.

 

[sfx2000]

Review of laptop cards might not be very useful, because it will be highly dependent on the antennas used by the specific laptop using that card.

Just as an FYI... certain Intel Cards do have some interop issues with certain features of 802.11....

The 72xx series for example - uAPSD issues that cut throughput significantly... which is maybe why Asus put in a switch in the Router/AP side to disable it. On windows, it can be disabled directly in the driver under advanced features (unfortunately the default is to enable)

Won't mention anything about "Throughput Booster" on the Windows drivers, lol...

All told though, I still like the Intel Client chipsets - I'm mostly a Linux and Mac person, but the Linux Intel drivers are pretty good. They don't do crazy stuff, they're predictable, and generally behave - some issues with Kismet, but many chips have issues there.

 

[avtella]

I remember the uAPSD issue around 2014 when I first got a 7260ac. Intel has now set it to default disabled in drivers for all models since a few years actually, not sure why it was enabled wherever you saw it. It’s also disabled by default on the latest 9260ac as well. Other than the uAPSD issue, Intel cards in my experience have actually been pretty solid vs Broadcom/Qualcomm cards in laptops.