PCIe slots, wifi, Broadcom HD, etc

Okay, this has been driving me nuts - I've gone through every thread I can find, plus read the PDF manual, and nothing seems to have a definitive solution:

So the main WiFI (stock, Atheros chip) is half height. No more space, because it butts up against the hard drive.

The second open PCIe slot is for a 3G modem, and isn't a "real" PCIe slot.

My goal would be to run OSX and have both a working WiFi card and use the Broadcom Crystal HD card - so (1) the existing wifi card could be swapped out with a broadcom chipset that's in a half-height form factor. The popular Dell 1390 isn't, but the 1500 series (1505?) seems to be, and would probably be supported.

But this leaves no room for the Broadcom HD card - which wouldn't have fit in the WiFi slot anyway. So for those that -are- using that card, where are you putting it? Is there some 3rd PCIe slot that I'm not finding? Or are you using the "cover 20th pin" trick, and putting it in the 3g slot? FWIW, that didn't work under OSX for me when I tried it, though I'm not 100% sure the drivers work with 10.6 anyway.

Everything else has been working though, including LAN, audio, and various other stuff, with fortunately minor .kext installs and trips to Terminal. So what's the story with the various cards and slots? Are different models of A-1 coming with more space than others? Mine's an A1-250, which came w/ a 160 gig internal, originally. (now has a 128 gig SSD though). But no way will anything but an half-height card fit in that one slot where the Atheros is. Can the 3G slot be modded to support a full PCIe card?

Also, has anyone disassembled one of those little wifi USB dongles and jammed it in there? I've got one that's pretty tiny - would easily fit in the case somewhere with some creative grinding. Just need to find a USB power supply inside. Any thread to point to where this has been done?

Thanks again for all the help here!

 

Months ago I took my AOD250, opened extra mini PCIe door, installed Broadcom Crystal HD card, screwed it down, replaced door, powered up and installed driver.

Crazy simple.

 

Maybe because I'm running OSX 10.6, its not quite so easy? I ran through an install from another site that had a .kext and driver, but I'm pretty sure it didn't "take". Nothing shows up in "about this mac."

 

Can't help you on that. You couldn't pay me to EVER use anything from that fucking worthless greedy company.

 

Maybe answered my own question; I put the old XP disk in and flashed the bios up to the most current. Removed the tape from pin 20 (I'd tried that earlier), and XP instantly recognized the card. Broadcom's windows installers then worked fine, and all was well. Put the OSX disk back in and booted back into 10.6, and video seems marginally smoother, though its hard to a/b test it when I didn't run any speed tests beforehand.

Subjectively though, my kids asked "did you change the computer? the videos are smoother"(talking about Flash games), and they didn't know I'd gotten the Broadcom working yet. So in a semi-blind test, at least some kind of speed bump was apparent.

 

The Broadcom card does not accelerate Flash games. The only role it plays with Flash is with video playback that is encoded with a codec that the card supports.

 

Right; didn't mean to imply that it sped up processing them - just playback smoothness. And objectively, I'm not even sure its doing anything in OSX. Like I first mentioned, I didn't ever benchmark anything (not sure how I could; maybe the "blitts" test in After Effects?). So is it working or not? Who really knows. If it is, its subtle.

For sure OSX is globally faster feeling than Windows. Everything is a little snappier. But who knows how much of that I could attribute to the Broadcom card. At least it was cheap, and nothing else was in there. So why not.

Though on the subject of OSX vs XP speed, the 250 runs hot as hell now, all the time. Never ran that hot in XP - it does concern me a little that lifespan may be effected.

 

hi i am working on a brothers D150-1920 acer netbook and the wifi card isn't working which i knew it wouldn't on osx but was wondering if anyone had a good idea for a replacement and also wondered if it would be able to take a broadcom cystal hd card at the same time as a wifi card or if a usb wifi card would be need to be used and then put the crystal hd chip where the wifi card is know. anyone have thoughts on this? thanks.