Author:
madcows
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Date:
3/21/2021 5:08:21 PM
Subject:
I had to buy a wifi card for my desktop
Unless I wanted to pull cabling through a crawl space (which I didn't), I had to settle on getting a wifi card for my desktop. I wasn't willing to go more than $50, so at first I was looking at a bunch of them for around $40 and began to notice after a bit of digging that the majority were based on an intel AX200. Digging a bit deeper I realized this was a complete M.2 PCIe module (which I didn't have the proper slot for) so all these cards were a simple carrier PCB for the module and contained no real components other than some connectors and LEDs themselves. The bare intel module was in the low $20s while the cheapest cards were in the mid $20s. The difference between these $20-something and $40-something cards? Essentially nothing. Some contained comically large heatsinks that did who knows what other than make the card look like it was something special.
