Thinkpads Forum

Regarding the coveted Atheros mini PCI Cards for the T60....

1. What are the negatives?

2. How significant is the increased power consumption?

3. Should I get an Atheros card that includes type N WIFI?

4. Are there particular Atheros cards available that work better than others?

5. My T currently says Intel pro wireless 3945 in the device manager. I am presuming that it has an Intel card. Correct?

Thanks

Padhead wrote: 3. Should I get an Atheros card that includes type N WIFI?

5. My T currently says Intel pro wireless 3945 in the device manager. I am presuming that it has an Intel card. Correct?

Thanks

Regarding #3, I'd hold out unless you already have equipment that makes use of it and would work with that card. The standard isn't finalized as of yet - but it is close.

Regarding #5: Yes, that is an Intel card.

the negatives is the power usage which therefore sucks some more power that gets warmer.

How signifcant? hmm... not sure.. probably 30mins less battery life or something.

Get the N one if i were you. You'd need a N router to go along with it but soon (June 2009 so not that soon) you'll start to see them everywhere.

There is only one Atheros N card, There is only 1 ABG Atheros card for the Thinkpads also, the others wont work because of the BIOS lock.

Padhead wrote:Regarding the coveted Atheros mini PCI Cards for the T60....

1. What are the negatives?

Amongst others, non-trivial interference issues with Bluetooth, inhibiting Bluuetooth operation.

Cheers,

Bill B.

My T60 has intel but my A31p has Atheros. Near all my TPs has BT, never encountered interference between the two.

What do you think Folks, should I wait for the N standard to firm-up or is buying the N Wifi card a safe bet at this point?

Anybody else having BT intereference with the Atheros mini pci card ? ON a T60?

thanks

I have BT intereference with my MS Presenter 8000 mouse. Only when I am connected with the N standard and transferring large files.

Padhead wrote:What do you think Folks, should I wait for the N standard to firm-up or is buying the N Wifi card a safe bet at this point?

Anybody else having BT intereference with the Atheros mini pci card ? ON a T60?

thanks

I have an N card. The OEM N card comes with three antennas. I bought it for $30 (I am not sure if it was in additon to what I had to pay for an ABG card) instead of an ABG card because of the factory installed antennas.

I believe the N card will be upgraded by the firmware as the BIOS is upgraded or updated.

Padhead wrote:What do you think Folks, should I wait for the N standard to firm-up or is buying the N Wifi card a safe bet at this point?

For a T60, I'd wait and hope that Levnovo does something about support for the Intel 4965 ABN card through a BIOS upgrade.

I have a Lenovo OEM Atheros 80211n card in my T60 and I'm seriously thinking about going back to the original Intel ABG card as it simply performs better at 802.11g speeds than the Atheros does at 802.11n speeds (as well as not fouling up my Bluetooth connections).

Cheers,

Bill B.

Padhead wrote:1. What are the negatives?

Your computer will no longer qualify for the Centrino branding.

Admittedly, I am not a fan of Intel wireless products, especially on the Linux platform. As a driver developer, the availability of Atheros driver source code won me over. Intel driver was available only as a binary package.

The 802.11n has been in draft stage for 3 years at least. I recall first seeing pre-N products in 2005. 3 years later the standard is still not finalized.

Thanks, at this point I am going to wait.

i'd get N now if you need the speeds. Getting N to browse the internet on DSL wont make your internet any faster. You can probably get a N router now tho as their firmwares are upgradeable to the final standard what's it's out. That is said to be early 2009 (by June 2009 is what i read last) so you could see some stuff for christmas, draft 2 or something.

I want a N card because i'll be setting up a NAS and you can't stream 4MB/s over wifi The most you can get is closer to 2.5MB/s That's bare minimum for HD feeds.

I am getting an average of 8500kb download speeds with my Intel 3945 ABG mini pci card, and no interference so i'll stay with that for a while.

Correction to what one poster said. The Atheros, or "Thinkpad" as it's referred to by Lenovo, DOES work in a T60/T60p, including the a/b/g/n card. The Intel 4965AGN does NOT. I know this, as a friend of mine has done to his T60p (model 2623-DDU) what I have. Install a Core 2 Duo CPU, 3GB of RAM, and the Atheros N card. The N card will NOT be rejected by the BIOS. I have not yet installed the N card, but I've seen it with my own eyes. He uses a Linksys 600N router and it works flawlessly, albeit with some tweaking with the channels.

If you're going to swap your Intel 3945ABG card for an Atheros card, you might as well get the one with wireless-N.

Padhead wrote:I am getting an average of 8500kb download speeds with my Intel 3945 ABG mini pci card, and no interference so i'll stay with that for a while.

Well the card is capable of 54,000KB if you want to think of it like that. Normally tho you'll get 20-25,000Kbps because of interference and overhead. So as i said if you're just gonna browse (i see you're in Laurel, not sure if they have FIOS up there yet but if they do you get 15,000Kbps max internet speed) internet then 54G is more than fast enough.

If you're copying huge files (9GB videos and all that) to your network server you'll want the speed. If you have multiple users downloading fast from the internet then yeah you'd want more speed too.