Is the Wifi/Bt Module on the Asrock X870 Steel Legend easily replaceable?

Long story short - thinking about switching from my current X670 Board to the Asrock X870 Steel Legend because it has a second CPU-connected PCIe Slot (for Mellanox ConnectX4-Lx) and built-in USB4.
The next most expensive boards with the same feature set are 400 Euro+.

But I don’t like the Wifi Chipset (it’s the typical AMD/Mediatek one - my current board uses it as well and it’s very troublesome).

Deducing from these two images by Kitguru and a HKEPC I found online it seems the Module should be replaceable:

The Asrock Website even states:

Logically I’d think they can’t really have interfered with it in any way where putting in a trusty AX211 would give me trouble. But I’m a little weary that it’s not mentioned in their manual, qsg or faqs.

Has anybody done this on this or a different Asrock Board?
If so, were there any warranty stickers that needed to be broken or glued or soldered on connections in the way?

I’ve done this, both swapping for better wifi and replacing with a riser to host a PCIe 3.0x2 SATA chipset (a 6-port ASM1155 one for spinning rust).

The boards I’ve tinkered with had a lot of the I/O shield in the way before I could unscrew the A+E key housing. There were no ‘warranty protection’ stickers, this board may differ, and I needed to take care to keep the power delivery capacitors and their thermal gunk so that the cooling solution would still apply. You will need to reuse the metal EM shield box to keep the replacement in its socket.

K3n.

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That sounds promising, thank you for sharing your experience.
I found an image of the bottom side of the VRM Heat-spreaders and they seem to use Thermal Pads on this SKU which of course makes things easier.

You can’t use an AX211 on an AMD board. The Intel WiFi cards ending in 1 are missing some hardware and rely on features built into the Intel chipset to function. You need an AX210 instead.

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heh, I guess I unknowingly dodged a bullet there.

As for the actual question, if this board is anything like mine, the wifi module will be a pain (under a lot of heatsinks and have screws on the bottom of the mb and I had this mb already installed) but doable and replacing it with an intel module will work basically flawlessly. Just be careful to not break the tiny antenna connectors. My board had some glue in there that I had to take off.

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Seconding what @GTwannabe says (and I should have remembered it in my answer) AX200 and AX210 are full-featured, AX211 is tied to Intel CPU/chipset like it’s 25 years ago and you’re buying a WinModem*.

*: one of the mass-market modem types was DSP-driven and needed the Windows drivers to load firmware so it could function as a modem, the things were useless without Windows.

K3n

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Do you happen to know if there are Intel BE2xx Wi-Fi 7 M.2 cards that work on X570 and X870E motherboards? (That have a BIOS on/off switch for their default onboard M.2 Wi-Fi modules)

Read a few reviews of those and some commenter mentioned an incompatibility with recent AM4/AM5 platforms that doesn’t have anything to do with that hardware components Intel has offloaded into their CPUs.

Just absoluetly dislike MediaTek Wi-Fi hardware.

Thanks for the reminder.
I had them mixed up and thought it was the other way around, but now that I’m checking my AMD laptop also has the AX210.

I also read that there are issues with the AMD Agesa and Intel’s Wifi 7 Chipsets, so i’m just going to go with Wifi6E.

Oh, I may need to correct myself about the PCIe Layout on this Board.

Specs on the Product Page and manual state the second slot is CPU-connected PCIe 4.0x4 in x16 Physical:
image

But once you actually read closely, it also says that it shares bandwidth with M2_3.
Which is connected to the Chipset, as per the same specs:
image

And indeed, when checking the Block Diagram in the Manual :roll_eyes:


PCIe Slot 2 is apparently PCH-connected.

At first I was wondering where the other 4 PCIe Lanes went, but they’re going to the USB 4 Controller.

Edit: I guess with USB4 being mandated on X870(E), if it has to be connected to the CPU and after subtracting the 4 5.0 lanes for the primary M.2 Slot, there will be no boards in the current gen with more than 16 Lanes for PCIe Slots or further M.2?