https://www.deskdecode.com/m-2-to-mini-pcie-a … -compatibility/

Perfect! I just grabbed one from Amazon for about $9 USD shipped.

Unfortunately, the story does not end here. The antenna ports on the M.2 PCIe laptop wifi cards are smaller than those on the previous standard mini PCIe wifi cards. The adapter I bought on eBay did not come with any kind of cable adapter, so now I need to buy another one. I cannot find the cables solo.

You can get the antenna cables from China on eBay. Just have to make sure the connections are the correct size.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_tr … ntenna&_sacat=0

I've actually been hoping someone would try out one of these weird Chinesium cards (so I didn't have to):
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002130038130.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002132439915.html
etc.
Especially if they had a kickass 802.11ax router. I want to see if they work better/worse than the adapter route (or if they work at all). 😀

Ohhh, I didn't know that those existed. I just purchased a Wifi6E PCIe card for my kids' desktop since it wasn't in a good place to be wired.

And then once I installed it I discovered that the router provided by ATT is Wifi6.

Not sure I have any laptops that need Wifi6 that use the old mini-PCIe connector though.

feipoa wrote on 2021-08-02, 06:03:

Unfortunately, the story does not end here. The antenna ports on the M.2 PCIe laptop wifi cards are smaller than those on the previous standard mini PCIe wifi cards. The adapter I bought on eBay did not come with any kind of cable adapter, so now I need to buy another one. I cannot find the cables solo.

FYI, the first card is mPCIe, the second is M.2 (with mPCIe lanes on it)

As for the antenna connector, the first has Hirose u.FL connectors, the second w.FL. And yes, getting those in anything resembling retail quantities is quite a challenge. I burn through quite a lot at work and whenever I can source a pile I get LOTS. And then some vendor comes along and uses reverse polarity w.FL and I melt down 😜

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-08-02, 19:52:

Ohhh, I didn't know that those existed. I just purchased a Wifi6E PCIe card for my kids' desktop since it wasn't in a good place to be wired.

That's okay, I was planning on going the adapter route (in a laptop that really has no room for it, hadn't figured that part out yet) before stumbling upon these. I hadn't really known about them either. They are one of the few, maybe the only one, putting these newer chips on an old mini-PCIe card - I figure either they're fake, or they're not working in some way, or they really have innovated in this backwards-compatible manner, but I haven't been daring enough to find out yet 😉

Given that M2 still uses the PCIe bus, there's nothing stopping a vendor putting the chips on an mPCIe module and no inherent reason it would perform any worse - but with this sort of stuff you get what you pay for and I'd be suspicious of these beasties. The fact they don't even specify the type of antenna connector doesn't help either, nor does some of the feedback: it looks rather hit-and-miss.

That said, seeing as my day job involves combating bad WiFi on a grand scale, and I'm so unhappy with my new laptop (that already has an Intel AX200 in it) that I still regularly use the old one with mPCIe, I'm ordering one too. If it's truly awful I can put it in our hall of shame at work 😉

Edit:
I went a slightly different route - my laptop has a full-height slot so I decided to go for this monstrosity - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002905426037.html - a genuine Intel AX210 on M.2 to mPCIe adapter, with u.FL to w.FL antenna adapters on it. Why? Because this does 6GHz as well as 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Also, if it doesn't work in the old laptop, or I decide to bin it after all, I can move the M.2 to a newer system/laptop.

Here's another stock of the Toulineua TL-AX210 mini-PCIe if you want to chance it, dionb 😉 :
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001748993588.html