With the Wi-Fi 7 specification set to be finalized early next year, Gigabyte is now offering a PCIe Wi-Fi 7 card, called the GC-WIFI7, that is perfect for upgrading current and older desktop PCs to the latest wireless standard.
The card comes in a small half-height, single-slot form factor, featuring a PCIe x1 interface that connects to the motherboard. It supports all of the major features Wi-Fi 7 supports, including MU-MIMO, 4K-QAM, MRU, and MLO which enables the card to utilize the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands simultaneously to transmit and accept data. Bandwidth is rated at up to 5800Mbps. On top of this, the GC-WIFI7 also comes with Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity for connecting wireless peripherals, audio gear, phones, and more.
The Wi-Fi card also comes with an antenna housed in a magnetized black plastic shroud, that should be easy to manage and tuck away, especially on steel and iron surfaces.
Wi-Fi 7 is the next generational leap in wireless technology that is set to succeed Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E in 2024. The new standard employs a variety of improvements, that more than quadruple the amount of bandwidth Wi-Fi can theoretically handle. In the real world, router manufacturers such as Netgear state speeds in the multi-gigabytes per second range for Wi-Fi 7 capable home routers.
There are several ways Wi-Fi 7 is achieving these substantially greater speeds compared to Wi-Fi 6/6E. One is through a feature we previously discussed called MLO or Multi-Link-Operation. This allows a client device to use multiple wireless bands and channels simultaneously to connect to a Wi-Fi 7-compatible router. In the past, wireless networks could only access up to two frequency bands at a time, like 2.4GHz and 5GHz, but with Wi-Fi 7 devices this feature has been expanded so that devices can connect to all three bands that are supported including 2.4GHz, 5GHz and the 6GHz band.
A couple of other noteworthy improvements come in the way of MU-MIMO and QAM. MU-MIMO effectively doubles the number of spatial streams that Wi-Fi 7 can support, from 8 to 16, while QAM, or Quadrature amplitude modulation, has been improved from 1024 to 4000. Maximum channel bandwidth has also been doubled from 160MHz to 320MHz. All these upgrades allow Wi-Fi 7 to have superior performance on each of the three bands.
Gigabyte’s new Wi-Fi 7 card is one the first PCIe options we’ve seen, although bare M.2 Wi-Fi 7 modules have been popping up at online retailers in recent weeks. U.S. pricing wasn’t yet available when we wrote this, but one thing’s for sure: Gigabyte’s card will cost a lot less than a new high-end Wi-Fi 7 router.
