I have joined team red!

Like many on AM4/5, I am having issues getting the Intel BE200 card working on my 5700x, MSI B550m VC system and only Bluetooth would work. Interestingly, the behavior was different depending on the PCIe slot used. When I installed the card in the M.2 E-key slot that came with the built-in WIFI card preinstalled, it would boot into Windows 10 and Linux just fine with WIFI not working and Bluetooth working, but with Windows 11 it would boot unstably and crashes on the login screen. When I install it in the chipset PCIe 3.0x1 slot via a M.2 to PCIe adaptor, it boots fine into Windows 11 but it would take a long time to POST and would always take 2 attempts. When I installed it in the primary 4.0x16 slot it would keep retrying to POST and not boot.

​

I saw some people here on r/AMD report that the BE200 works on AM3 so I wanted to try for myself. I had an old Athlon 64 X2 system lying around and wanted to see if the WIFI card worked there. I got it working on Ubuntu 24.04 with 2GB of DDR2. Web browsing works but running speedtest made the system completely unresponsive so I didn't bother trying to benchmark it.

​

https://preview.redd.it/uoiusils42yc1.jpg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=28db1b3eacc4d3c7d82aee6bbc6514b0fbb42201

​

16 GT/s suggests this is a PCIe 4.0 card

Compatibility:

According to Wi-Fi 7 comes to WLAN Pi M4 - Jiri Brejcha, BE200 works on ARM with Raspberry Pi. This accessory for the Pi 5 also explicitly lists compatibility. Of course, compatibility isn't perfect as this thread has people unable to get it working on BPI-R4. It also works on AM2/3 and some Am4 based on reports on this sub. I think it is pretty safe to say that the BE200 is compatible with non-Intel systems and is not locked to Intel via drivers or hardware. Given the issues posting the problem seems to be with the BIOS and PCIe initialization. On my AM4 system, the card does not appear in BIOS or under the device manager.

I've contact all of AMD, Intel, and MSI customer support and they all pointed at each other. AMD said that the card is not listed as a compatible device for my board and Intel said general incompatibilities can happen. MSI interestingly said that Intel needs to fix the issue before they can verify compatibility, but if this is the case it would imply a hardware issue since the issue happens during post. I decided to post this on Reddit since it is faster than contacting support. Please AMD, Intel, and motherboard vendors, fix the compatibility issue.

​

Speculation:

Based on my screenshot above and the AIDA64 screenshot here the BE200 is a 4.0x1 card, which is surprising because it only has a max speed of 5.8 Gbps which 3.0x1 should be able to handle just fine at about 8Gbps. The Mediatek Wifi 7 MT7927 is 3.0x1 according to the 6th screenshot here and it seems to work on AMD. Given that 4.0x1 NICs seem pretty rare especially WLAN cards, it's possible that PCIe 4.0 is part of the problem. I could not find what PCIe version the Qualcomm QCNCM865 uses so we'll see if the theory holds. PCIe 4.0 is not a problem with SSDs and graphics cards, but it is possible AM4/5 does something a little different for WIFI cards. This is backed up by PCI IDs being used to distinguish between types of PCIe devices and how BIOS whitelists for WIFI and WWAN cards only apply to those types of cards and not SSDs, like here. This suggests that the BIOS handles initialization of different devices differently. My theory is that there is a bug in the initialization of gen 4.0 WIFI cards.

​