Which cheap wifi/bluetooth combined card should I get for my bios modded L520?

[GabennB]

I'm using Linux and I'm a bit scared of the obvious choice, which is the 7260 ac. (source: https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comme ... on_issues/ )

My main priorities are having 5ghz available, getting at least 100Mb on 2.4ghz and also being able to stream media from the internet while listening to it on my Bluetooth speakers with no wifi or Bluetooth stability issues.

Aliexpress has countless very cheap wifi cards that could work. Which one should I get? As for masking the Bluetooth disabling pin, is that always the same pin, even on the latest & greatest AX cards?

Initially I had problems with the factory supplied Bluetooth daughter card dropping the signal every 1-11 minutes. I though it has to be Pipewire playing games with me, but after a while I just decided to try an Atheros 9565 and that solved all crashes & instability, it's just that it's very slow & has low latency in comparison to even the horrible RTL card I had before.

Thoughts?
I wouldn't mind going back to the daughter card, if there was a good way to make it stable on Linux, something in the AUR maybe?

[GabennB]

I meant to say "high latency" there.

Would an AR5B22 based card do better than what I have now on 2.4Ghz?

[TPFanatic]

Dud cards exist, if it’s cheap enough you can buy multiple and have redundancy. My experiences with 7260 and bootleg AX210 are neutral, they seem to work fine, I don’t have experience with the bluetooth functionality since i don’t use it.

[GabennB]

After finding someone that also successfully made bluetooth work after covering pin51 on an Aliexpress bought AC 8265, I ended up ordering that.

[kfzhu1229]

Would an AR5B22 based card do better than what I have now on 2.4Ghz?

I have a bunch of AR5B22's, a bunch that look to be Acer OEM and one that's a Dell OEM, they all worked perfectly fine with both wifi and bluetooth for me in windows 10/11 and the special Windows 10 drivers for bluetooth that I dug through acer drivers.
If you are going to use bluetooth and wifi with a constant connection simultaneously though, I highly recommend you cool down the card in some sort of fashion. If your airflow is poor and you are using the card in that fashion the wifi performance can start throttling or that the bluetooth can start to get glitchy.

[GabennB]

After finding someone that also successfully made bluetooth work after covering pin51 on an Aliexpress bought AC 8265, I ended up ordering that.

https://i.imgur.com/LgLxGG0.jpeg

The new wifi card arrived. As anticipated, pin51 needed to be masked. Other than that it seems like a great card so far.