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I was reading up on this guide on how to upgrade a 1st gen MacBook's Airport to 802.11n. they used a Mac Pro Airport Extreme card which can be purchased from a number of authorised Apple resellers that stock parts. in the second paragraph they said that the Airport Extreme module is PCI Express 1x.

 

can the Mac Pro's Airport Extreme card or a Dell 1500/1505 wireless PCIe card (which is identical to the Airport card) work on a hackintosh with a EFI/vanilla Leopard install and a mobo that supports PCIe 1x?

 

you would think that this wireless card would be the most compatible with Leopard as its used in the Mac Pro.

 

im want to build a hackintosh that is very similar to the Mac Pro besides the 4 core xeons and the FB-DIMM RAM so i would love to get a wireless card that has no external antennae!

 

and yes i like using wireless with a desktop as my wireless router and ADSL port is situated in a different room.

Donnot about this card but a Dlink DWA 552 works like a charm in wireless N

 

Does this card do 802.11N @5ghz? I couldn't get that from the literature of the card, so I went this route. Most of the pci cards I found only did 2.4ghz.

 

If I build a smaller "hack" I may consider this card if it does.

thanks macgirl for the link! :) ill definitely take this into consideration.

 

terrancew_hod how was the installation? does it work out of the box and appear as Aiport? full draft-N speeds?

 

The hardest part of the installation was putting the antennas on the atheros AR 5008 pcie card. :( Small little devils...

 

I then put the card in the adapter and turned on the machine. Leopard recognized it as Airport Extreme (a/b/g/n) without drivers. I haven't tested the speeds, as I'm waiting for my Time Capsule order to ship. But I believe my reception improved. So far I have no problems with downloads/web access and I think it's moving more data due to the pci express bus than regular pci.

 

I bought more antennas online for my mini (upgraded that to a 802.11N card as well) with a 5dbi to improve reception and they should be in soon.

 

The solution is more expensive (I paid $50 for the wireless card and $104 USD for the adapter) but I can theoretically connect to the Airport Express at the 5ghz speed from the desktop.

ok thanks. sounds easy as. but im not getting the antennas. do you need them? arent the antennas already in the card? if so do they have to be placed outside the case?

 

Yep, you'll need them. Unless specified, the antennas won't be included. I didn't get them for my mac mini when I upgraded and I can't connect to anything... Hopefully those will be in next week.

 

I put the antennas outside my case... chances are there's too much interference for them to be inside the case.

  • 1 year later...

did you folks who have the PCI card working use a PCI-e x1 slot or regular PCI? also, did you have to use both antennas to the mini pci card? what adapter did you use , i have purchased the Mp2W from hwtools.net and can't seem to get my computer to recognize the card when installed. I have been told that I need to activate the card via windows however my hackintosh is single boot OSX only.

the card I have is a airport extreme card broadcom 4321 MC that works in my MSI wind as a native card. Any suggestions would be much apprecaited. Also, what dbi antennas are needed for wireless n at 5ghz?

  • 1 year later...

for what its worth. bcm94322 aka 4322 (dell 150x? 1505?) with MP2W-2400 SHOULD work.

MPW is for pci-e to mini pci-e and is only $20 without antennas $29 with @ www.hwtools.net

im thinking of going this way.

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