Another thing checked off my bucket list – learning how to upgrade the WiFi chip in my laptop.
I recently upgraded my home broadband network to 10Gbps and WiFi 7, so I have been upgrading the different devices in the house to take advantage of the high speed network. For my home desktop PC, I bought the MSI Herald-BE card to add the WiFi 7 wireless capability. That worked well, so I bought another MSI card to upgrade my Lenovo Legion gaming laptop.
It’s a simple procedure for anyone who is not afraid to open up their laptop to fiddle with the innards. Also, gaming laptops are designed to be easily upgradeable since the target customer is usually a geek. I extracted the Qualcomm WiFi 7 chip from the MSI card and replaced the existing WiFi 6E chip in the laptop. You just have to be careful to disconnect the laptop battery beforehand so you don’t damage the laptop.
Now, WiFi 6E is already very fast. I was getting about 1.8 Gbps download speeds. WiFi 7 ups it to about 3 Gbps!
That said, you won’t really see a difference in your day-to-day online activities as 1 Gbps is more than enough for watching Netflix in 4K. The only benefit today is when you are downloading games like Black Myth: Wukong which is about 130 GB in size. It now takes me about 15 minutes to download the game, versus 45 minutes previously. The benefits of WiFi 7 will be more apparent in coming years when more devices (such as smartphones and TVs) have the technology built in and 4K (or even 8K) resolution content become mainstream.
Ah, the cost and the fun of being an early adopter!