Fast forward a few weeks later, a good friend of mine (hey Mike! :) ), recent switcher, IM'd me saying that he'd found a Broadcom mini PCI-E card on eBay and that he wanted to upgrade his MacBook Pro Core Duo with it, and points me to the reference "Dell Draft N 1500 Wireless mini PCI-E card". After checking it out, it turns out the chipset is exactly the same as the one our own Lionel mentioned in a recent newsbit (BCM94321MC). So I go "WTH", and ordered 2 of those bad boys.
Less than a week later, I get the cards in a small USPS envelope, and decide that I'll do the upgrade on the very same evening. With the help of my trusty philips head screw driver, I took the keyboard/top case off easily (not my first time though, so YMMV, just do not rush into it and make sure you remember which screw goes where) and removed the Apple wireless card. Here are the two little dudes next to each other. (left is Apple's, right is Dell's)
The Dell card is a tad thicker, but fits in the slot without effort or problems :
I screwed things back together (again, no rush, you do not want to mix the screws) and the machine booted normally.
Since I've got myself an Airport Extreme base station, the new drivers (aka the "802.11n enabler") were already installed along the Airport Utility. I opened the Network Utility.app and as you can see the card is showing as "a/b/g/n". Coolio.
Shockingly, the system sees the card as being from "Vendor Apple", which is another way of saying that this card from Dell is in fact virtually the same card as Apple uses in the MacPro, minus the Apple logo sticker.
Performance wise, it's very much in line with what Lionel obtained in his tests before :
On a "802.11n only" network, I got between 8.3 and 8.6MB/sec while FTPing from a mac mini hooked up via ethernet on the base station.
In mixed mode g/n I got about 5.5~6MB/s from my upgraded MacBook.
On my girlfriend's, we got the standard 3.7MB/sec of 802.11g, to put things in perspective.
Range wise, it was at maximum everywhere in my apartment, whereas my girlfriend's laptop got a little drop in signal strength in the bedroom.
The only little annoyance that I noted was due to the fact that the Dell card, since bought in the States, was set to a locale of "USA" :
which meant that the card could only see channels from 1 to 10. That initially puzzled my for a while, but then I clicked and I forced my Japanese Airport Extreme base station (which can use channels from 1 to 13, and when set to "automatic", uses the less crowded channels, i.e >10) to broadcast on a channel <11, all was good again. I tried to change the locale of the card via Windows XP and the Dell utilities for this card but the change isn't persistent across reboots. This issue is irrelevant when you operate in a 802.11n only, 5GHz network.
All in all, this is a great and cheap (can be found for US$45 + shipping) upgrade for all Core Duo machines.
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