Update on 2025-12-27:

After using my laptop for a month, I can say that the connection has been so much more reliable, it feels like a different laptop now. It almost instantly connects to the school WiFi after being awaken from sleep, and it has never dropped a connection, even in a very crowded library during the final’s week.

It clearly was a worthy upgrade for under $25.

MediaTek RZ616 network cards that ship with Framework laptops with AMD Ryzen 7040 series or Ryzen “AI” 300 series CPU are known to be unreliable. I too, have been experiencing issues with it in my Framework 13. The speed is acceptable, but establishing connection, especially with my school WiFi that uses 802.1x authentication, would take minutes, and in many densely populated areas, it would disconnect frequently. Since it was on Black Friday sale, I bought the Intel AX210 from the Amazon link in this Framework forum thread. It seemed to be a popular upgrade, and as long as you get one without the Intel vPro, it is a simple and effective upgrade.

Did I Get Scammed?

One thing I did not know: it turns out, Intel AX210 is name of the chipset, and listings for PCIe cards you see on Amazon are other manufacturers making network cards with the said chipset. So imagine my surprise when I opened the box and it was from…

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in questioning the naming choice. Please invest a little bit of time and money to proofread your company name when you are doing a business in English speaking countries.

Installation

After verifying that I probably was not scammed, I proceeded with the installation.

I used lspci -k to verify that it was indeed Intel AX 210.

Massive Speed Improvement?

I used speedtest-cli in my apartment WiFi (unknown spec) before and after the installation.

Here is the before:

And here is the result after the upgrade!

And the crowd goes… mild <insert that GIF from Bug’s Life that you cannot find anywhere online because Disney>

For the reference, this is the same test on my M1 MacBook Air:

This is obviously not the most scientific testing, but a simple test in my school WiFi showed that it was marginally better than the MediaTek, but not as good as whatever the integrated network module that Apple uses.

Conclusion

The real test is whether it can holds a reliable connection even in crowded areas, which was my biggest issue with the MediaTek. I cannot test that until next week when the Thanksgiving break ends, so fingers crossed.

And it was a worthy upgrade for sure! Read the update in the top of the post!