Intel AX210 Upgrade Issues

[cjacobs0]

I currently have a Pavilion 15-eh0090wm.

It has the AX200 wireless chipset installed.  I wanted to upgrade to the newest AX210 chipset.

I purchased the "non-vPro" version on eBay, (didn't say HP part on it but I believe it's the same regardless as the images match non-HP listings) = AX210NGW

After installation, first thing I noticed is the computer did a "power light on, power light off" immediately.  Seemed to fail to show any bios/indications on screen.  I pulled the battery and hard reset and that seemed to get it to the OS again (after a CMOS warning/reset displayed on screen).

Next, it appears Windows 10 didn't show the card listed in device manager.  At all.  No "exclamation point", no "network adapter", nothing.  My best guess is that the card is not being passed to the OS layer from the BIOS.

I have read that HP stopped doing whitelists, so my question is, what's going on?  Is the BIOS simply not ready to support the AX210 chipsets?  I believe I'm running an older BIOS from last year, but the newer BIOS don't indicate added support and I hesitate to update BIOS without a really good reason.

I took the chip and moved it to a 2017 *other brand* laptop computer, and it recognized it right away and presented it to that laptop's OS (needed a driver).

Are HP engineers willing to entertain issues like this to add BIOS support for these newer network cards?  Does the above behavior sound familiar to anyone?  It sounds like either the BIOS doesn't support it, or even worse, my laptop has a hidden whitelist on it.

[Huffer]

First of all I do not work for HP. I can tell you there are no more BIOS whitelists but there can be issues with VPro/nonVPro wireless card interoperability. Can you describe the card you removed including any HP Part number and the identifiers on the replacement card? I can also tell you there will be no rewriting of BIOS in response to hardware upgrade issues. HP just does not do that, but I think in this case it is not a BIOS issue. If it were you could not have booted to the OS with the wifi card installed; you would have received a hard stop BIOS message. I am not finding a "non-VPro" AX210 and it seems maybe all of them are VPro devices:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/204836/intel-wifi-6e-ax210-gig.html

[cjacobs0]

Thanks.  The model I purchased was "AX210.NGWG.NV", which indicates non-vPro per this site: Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX210 (Gig+)

In case others come across this thread in the future, there are other support links that indicate similar issues (took a bunch of searching I probably should have done before buying the module):

Wi-Fi adapter upgrade on "whitelisted" laptop - HP Support Community - 8164787

WiFi Upgrade - HP Support Community - 8142653

Pavilion Gaming 15 Wifi upgrade : Hewlett_Packard (reddit.com)

The last HP support link there seems to indicate a host of problems when using AX210.  I'm guessing the BIOS isn't initializing it properly or there is a hidden/subtle whitelist going on.  Even if HP adds this as a supported module in future notebooks, there will always be the issue if the newer BIOS code is "incidentally" backported to the older notebooks like mine (or if they use numerous branches of their code in the company).