Are wireless cards OEM/BIOS locked now? Upgrade went wrong...

[Kamiru]

So the story is as follows. I've got a new pair of BT 5.2 earphones and since my Atheros QCNFA344A only supported BT 4.1 (terrible connection quality) I wanted to upgrade my card. I bought Mediatek MT7921 that supposedly came from a Lenovo Legion and installed it into my Acer Aspire 7. The WiFi works just fine but installing a bluetooth driver completely nukes this device from the device manager. WTF!? I need to physically remove the card and insert it again to be able to see a "Generic Bluetooth Device" but reinstalling the driver makes it completely disappear. Any ideas? This is just crazy.

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, Kamiru said:

So the story is as follows. I've got a new pair of BT 5.2 earphones and since my Atheros QCNFA344A only supported BT 4.1 (terrible connection quality) I wanted to upgrade my card. I bought Mediatek MT7921 that supposedly came from a Lenovo Legion and installed it into my Acer Aspire 7. The WiFi works just fine but installing a bluetooth driver completely nukes this device from the device manager. WTF!? I need to physically remove the card and insert it again to be able to see a "Generic Bluetooth Device" but reinstalling the driver makes it completely disappear. Any ideas? This is just crazy.

If its BIOS locked usually the laptop will refuse to POST at all, so I doubt its that.

[Kamiru]

I can't really confirm this but it seems that MT7921 will work properly only on AMD chipsets... One website mentioned that it was designed with AMD in mind and that seems to be true as I can't find any Intel laptops that shipped with it. Would be nice if somebody could confirm this. A bit ridiculous if you ask me, not much different from OEM locking.

[Alex Atkin UK]

27 minutes ago, Kamiru said:

I can't really confirm this but it seems that MT7921 will work properly only on AMD chipsets... One website mentioned that it was designed with AMD in mind and that seems to be true as I can't find any Intel laptops that shipped with it. Would be nice if somebody could confirm this. A bit ridiculous if you ask me, not much different from OEM locking.

My go to is always Intel on any platform, the AX200 or AX210.  Never skimp on your WiFi chip, you're asking for problems.

 

I do not believe the MT7921 is AMD exclusive though, its just when building an Intel laptop the manufacturer gets a deal on Intel chips, so naturally its more common to find Intel on those, especially if they decide to cheap out and use CNVi (limited by the WiFi version inside the CPU) instead of PCIe cards (can most likely be upgraded to WiFi 7 when it comes out).