How to Upgrade a Laptop’s Internal WiFi Card to Wi-Fi 6

The Wi-Fi 6 (Wi-Fi AX) standard is here to stay. In recent years we have seen how manufacturers have been launching their first wireless routers and also Wi-Fi access points. If you are going to buy a new laptop, it is very likely that it comes with the Intel AX200 , an internal Wi-Fi 6 card with two antennas and of the AX3000 class. However, if your laptop is old and does not incorporate this card, you do not have to worry, you can buy the Intel AX200 for about 30 euros and install it. Today in this article we are going to explain in detail how to locate and install it.

Our laptop since 2015 is the Lenovo X1 Carbon , a device that at that time was really good at the connectivity level, incorporating the Intel Wireless Dual-Band AC7265 Wi-Fi card, an AC1300 class card with which we could get up to 400Mbps in the 2.4GHz band, and a speed of up to 867Mbps in the 5GHz band thanks to Wi-Fi 5. In all the analyzes in this article we have always used this laptop with the different USB 3.0 Wi-Fi adapters, including testing with the Intel AC7265 card which generally provided the best performance.

With the departure of Wi-Fi 6, this Intel AC7265 Wi-Fi network card has become really obsolete if we compare it with the Intel AX200, this new Wi-Fi card has very important characteristics to get to squeeze the performance of the new routers and Wi-Fi repeaters with the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard:

2 internal antennas
Up to 574Mbps in the 2.4GHz band
Up to 2.402Mbps in the 5GHz band, thanks to the fact that it is compatible with 160MHz of channel width and Wi-Fi 6.
Beamforming, MU-MIMO and OFDMA compliant.

Therefore, we have all the characteristics of Wi-Fi 6 to achieve the best possible performance, in addition, as if this were not enough, it also supports the wireless security protocol WPA3-Personal and WPA3-Enterprise, as long as you use a compatible operating system ( like the latest version of Windows 10), and your router / AP supports this type of encryption.

Once we have seen the main features of the Intel AX200, we are going to disassemble the laptop and locate the Wi-Fi card.

Unmounting the laptop and locating the Wi-Fi card

The Lenovo X1 Carbon is an ultrabook that is really easy to disassemble, we will simply need a small star screwdriver, and also a flat screwdriver to help us remove the UFL connectors from the Wi-Fi card.

To access the internal components, all we will have to do is remove each and every one of the screws that we have in sight, there are none under the non-slip pads, therefore, we will not have to remove them and then put them back. Once we have removed all the screws, the case will come out on its own without having to “pry” with the flat screwdriver.

When we remove the lower case, we can see that in the upper right we find the 512GB SSD, the 4G LTE card that I bought optionally with the laptop, and just to the right we have the Intel AC7265 card.

In the following photograph you can see in detail the situation of the Wi-Fi card, and how there are two small cables connected to it through UFL connectors.

Replacing the old Wi-Fi card with the new Intel AX200

Both the gray and black cables, we must remove it from the UFL connector, to later remove that fixing screw of the Wi-Fi card, and finally remove the old Wi-Fi card to put the new one.

Once we have replaced one card with another, and we have correctly put the antenna cables in the UFL connectors, we will be able to see in all its splendor the new Intel AX200 Wi-Fi card in this laptop, which has provided us with around 1,000 Real Mbps speed over Wi-Fi.

In the following image you can see the detail of the new Wi-FI card perfectly installed to replace the previous one:

As you can see, we now have the Intel AX200 working perfectly on this laptop.

If you use the Windows 10 operating system, it will automatically recognize the card and install the drivers, but it may not install the latest drivers available, therefore, it is highly recommended that you go directly to the download section of the Intel AX200 and download the latest drivers available. When you install the latest drivers and have restarted your computer, you will be ready to connect to the Internet with the maximum possible speed.

In our recent tests, we have achieved synchronizations with the 2.4Gbps router, that is, the maximum speed that Wi-Fi 6 allows us with 160MHz of channel width and 2 internal antennas:

In addition, another important aspect is that we have compatibility with WPA3-Personal, and we can connect to any router or AP that supports this type of security, as you can see here: