Older Intel wireless (7260) poor performance

F

Fastcorners

I have Dell 7450 laptop with an Intel 7260 wireless card. In previous versions of FreeBSD it was supported very well and had an Ookla speed of 120meg download. With FreeBSD 14.3p2 it’s down to 14.5 meg. This was not an upgrade but a fresh install on a former Windows machine. What happened to the Intel support for the earlier cards? As an insurance policy I’ve ordered an Intel AX210 card which from what I’ve seen in the release notes should be well supported. Anyone know what is going on? Is it me? Thanks. It does connect at A11ac.
 
I also have an intel dual band 7260 ac card, and it's giving me ~11 mbps on fast.com speed test

I'm pretty sure even the old 6205 that came with this laptop was doing significantly better, could test back to back to see

Any clue about this? I was expecting better performance with the recent driver improvements to wifi

Also, a day or two after changing the wifi card on this laptop, i had a random reoot out of the blue, which is very out of character for this hardware and OS (thinkpad t420 w/freebsd 14.3p3). Any way to check what could have caused it? which logs to examine?

Will be updating to 14.3p4 later tonight, hopefully it improves something

I recently switched from lenovo bios to coreboot, and from sandy bridge cpu to ivy bridge (T420 thinkpad), but I don't expect that's playing a role in the reboots, or could it?
 
daniel_jimenez said:
Any way to check what could have caused it? which logs to examine?
Click to expand...
Thinkpads are a bit sensitive with these cards in the sense that the contacts in one of my older ones need to be cleaned sometimes and the card properly reseated or it will also simply reboot from time to time - but every time you pick it up and apply a little pressure to the bottom right where that card is.
 
Crivens said:
Thinkpads are a bit sensitive with these cards in the sense that the contacts in one of my older ones need to be cleaned sometimes and the card properly reseated or it will also simply reboot from time to time - but every time you pick it up and apply a little pressure to the bottom right where that card is.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads up, I'll remove it, clean it up with some isopropyl and the socket with some compressed air (and maybe isopropyl, too).

In fact, it may be a good time to reintroduce the old 6205 and try to measure the performance.

Two quick questions:

- Can the 7260 also use the older iwm driver?
- What are the most highly recommended card for freebsd in laptop usage these days? (atheros? if so, which model? another one of intel's?)

I don't need blazing fast speeds, just reliability and not to be super slow.
For reference the 7260 is doing just 4 mbps upload with iwlwifi now.
 
Just to report some results of back-to-back testing of the Intel 7260 and Intel 6205 on FreeBSD 14.3:

- Intel 7260 has severe performance issues under iwlwifi driver (iwm not tested). Internet speed tests showed 11 to 18 mbps on download and 4 mpbs (!) on upload. Bluetooth interface of the 7260 was detected on USB, but untested.

- Intel 6205 shows >100 mbps on download and >150 mpbs on upload (my cellphone shows 360 mpbs down and >200 mpbs up on the same network). The 6205 doesn't have a bluetooth interface, so that's a downside.

I've got an Intel AX200 card on the way, should benefit from the new driver work on 14.3, hopefully it beats the 6205 and I can get the bluetooth component to work.

One more issue of note: Under the 7260 I had issues of random (infrequent) reboots, the first occurrence was one or two days after installing the card, I noticed the reboots happened when loading the wifi, and also twice while resetting the connection. The purpose was to try and get bluetooth running.

I was in the process of trying to diagnose it, when I realized the speed was much slower than expected, so I never got to testing bluetooth.

Back to the old card while the AX200 gets here. Thought I'd give this a post to let people know.

I don't know if the iwm driver (which supposedly can handle the 7260) would be much better, or if it would prevent the random reboots, but in any case the AX200 is supposed to be a better performer, and was fairly inexpensive.

Hope this helps somebody.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top