LENOVO Thinkpad P72 – WiFi 6

1. LENOVO Thinkpad P72 - Introduction

My daily driver is a LENOVO Thinkpad P72 notebook. I really love this notebook. Although bought in februari 2019, it’s still competative and powerfull enough today.

This 17-inch workstation notebook is a well made power notebook featuring the best keyboard a notebook can get.

It has an 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, a NVidia Quadro P600 4GB graphics card, a 17 inch Full HD IPS display panel and 16 GB DDR4 memory. The bios supports TPM 2.0. The OS is Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit.

2. LENOVO Thinkpad P72 - Storage

I installed the following 3 storage devices:

2x SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus 500 GB NVME SSD

1x CRUCIAL MX500 2TB Sata SSD

3. LENOVO Thinkpad P72 - WiFi 6E upgrade

After a few years I tried to upgrade the internal INTEL Wireless-AC 9560, Wi-Fi 2×2 802.11ac + Bluetooth 5.0, M.2 card to a WiFi 6 compatible M2 card.

At first I tried an INTEL WiFi 6E AX201, both the VPro and the non VPro version. Each time the notebook didn’t activate the M2 WiFi 6 card by stating “Unallowed NIC installed”. 

Then I bought a INTEL AX210 M2 vPro WiFi card. This NIC supports WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 and works like a charm. I can now transfer files at 113 MB/s. The bottleneck is now the wired part of my home network, not the wireless part.

4. LENOVO Thinkpad P72 - WiFi 6E installation

LENOVO has assembled an exellent set of removal and replacement videos for the P72, available here.

To remove the existing M2 WiFi NIC, located under the keyboard, you’ll have to follow the following sequence :

  1. Disable Built In Battery
  2. Keyboard removal
  3. Wireless LAN card removal

Then install the new NIC and finally reassemble everything as it was.

CAUTION:

Be carefull not to damage the central touchpad button while removing the Thinkpad keyboard! 

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