Can You Put a Laptop Wifi Card on a Desktop

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Is it possible to put a laptop Wi-Fi card on a desktop? Yes, But You’ll need a PCI Express Wi-Fi adapter, and in My Opinion, You should use a USB Wi-Fi adapter that works better than a laptop Wi-Fi card.

Salvaging out any components from the laptop and using them on your desktop is not worth it. Except for the SATA hard drives which are only possible if the sizes match, but if the sizes do not match you will need drive adapters or new drive brackets to mount on it. Nothing can be used from a laptop to a desktop typically.

Can You Put Laptop Wifi Card on Desktop?

Putting a laptop wifi card on a desktop in a straightforward manner is only possible when the laptop and desktop motherboards have the same bus architecture for the wifi card, which is a very unusual thing.

The problem is putting the laptop’s wifi card on a desktop is to find a compatible slot on the desktop’s motherboard for the laptop’s wifi card. And it is highly unlikely to find such a slot on the desktop’s motherboard. Hence, the internal wireless cards for laptops are not compatible with desktops. Also, the internal laptop wifi cards are more likely to be integrated into the motherboard.

Laptop Wifi Card Adopter For Desktop

Laptop Wifi Card

But , How I put a laptop wifi card on a desktop?

But there are ways that can be adapted to indirectly place the laptop wifi card on the desktop.

The laptop wifi card needs a mini PCI express card slot or adapters on the desktop motherboard. If the motherboard has a PCI Express slot, we can fit a mini PCI express wifi card.

For this, we need to fit a mini PCI express wifi card to a mini PCI express adapter with the PCI Express slot. But if the motherboard we are working with is old, we do not have the PCI express slots, instead of these PCI express slots, there are PCI slots.

In this case, we need a mini PCI adapter with the PCI slot and fit the mini PCI wifi card on it. These mini PCI and mini PCI express adapters simply route the mini card pins mechanically to the full-sized PCI  or PCI Express slots in the desktop motherboard. Also, the drivers used by these adapters are the same as the ones used by the laptops.

Is There Any Motherboard That Supported Laptop Wifi Card?

Some Mini ITX motherboards already have a mini PCI Express slot in them, for which we do not need any adapters and can fit the wifi card in it directly.

What’s better, a laptop WiFi card adapter or a USB WiFi card for the desktop?

These mini PCI express adapters come at a low price. But a more economical solution is buying a USB wireless adapter and using it on desktops. These adapters do not need the desktop to have a wifi card. These are cheaper than the mini PCI express adapters.

These adapters simply need to be plugged into the desktop and start working. There is a tradeoff of transfer data rate and cost, the transfer rate on a USB adapter will be a bit lower than the card but if you are comfortable with spending more money you can go for the PCI e adapters for the card.

Also if you use the wireless card, it will occupy one of your precious PCI e slots, while the USB wireless adapter will use a port simply.

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The installation of the WiFi PCI express card is also challenging. So the nontechies and the users that are low on a budget would go for the USB adapter option instead.