QCNCM865 vs MT7927 Comparison

For most of the Framework AMD 7040's life, the only choice for a full-featured Wifi-7 card on Linux was the Qualcomm QCNCM865. The Mediatek 7925 in the RZ717 lacks support for 320MHz channel width, and the Intel BE200 was not an option since that card prevented AMD machines from booting.

With the release of Linux 7.2, we finally have a second choice for full-featured Wifi-7 cards: the MT7927.

I purchased both cards and tested them in my Framework 13 AMD 7040 laptop to see how they compare. This isn't a scientific test; I live in an apartment in a dense city without a faraday cage, so I am unable to control all variables. Regardless, I did my best to make the tests fair and I hope this data helps others in picking their wifi cards.

AI Disclaimer

AI was not used for any part of this post. LLMs are a powerful tool that are rapidly changing the tech landscape. While I recognize their value, they have created an imbalance. In the past, each article/post took more effort to produce than it took to read. Today, an LLM can generate an infinite pile of posts before lunch. While low quality and high quality posts are possible both with and without LLMs, I have written every word of this post and every line of code without an LLM. Therefore this article took more effort to produce than it takes to read.

Conclusion

The MT7929 is the clear winner in terms of raw performance (speed / latency) whereas the QCNCM865 used less power. Personally, I am going to stick with the MT7927 because I'm almost always plugged in, so the power usage difference isn't much of a concern. If I used my laptop on battery more often, that 1-2 extra watts consumed by the MT7927 could have a meaningful impact on battery life.

That being said, bluetooth support for the MT7927 is not yet upstreamed, so if you rely on bluetooth, you may want to either use the QCNCM865 or at least wait a bit before adopting the MT7927.

Comparison

Frequency

First, the elephant in the room. My laptop connected over 5GHz wifi in every test except for one: the MT7927 going through a wall with powersaving off. In that test, my laptop connected over 6GHz. I did nothing to influence which band the laptop used, so I think it is fair to let the MT7927 reap the rewards of connecting over 6GHz. For this reason, in many of the graphs below, the MT7927 going through a wall with powersaving off appears as an outlier.

Speed

For this test, I ran an iperf3 server on my router to measure the speed between my laptop and my router. The traffic did not go out to the public internet, so it is not impacted by my home ISP. I ran 4 tests.

In all 4 tests, the MT7927 going through a wall with powersaving off is the clear winner, but that is likely a direct result of using the 6GHz band.

In the remaining tests, the MT7927 scores a faster transfer rate than the QCNCM865, but not by a significant amount.

Upload from laptop to router over tcp

Download from router to laptop over tcp

Upload from laptop to router over udp

Download from router to laptop over udp

Latency

For this test, I ran ping to my router for 10 minutes to measure the latency.

While both cards spent most of their time below 10ms, the QCNCM865 had some pings that went higher to 30ms and even over 100ms. I do not know if these latency spikes indicate a problem or if they are a result of U-APSD working correctly.

I also averaged their latency across the entire test, which shows the MT7927 as the clear winner. That being said, it is important to note we're only talking about a difference of ~4ms which should be imperceptible to humans.

Power Consumption

For the power consumption tests, all readings are the full power usage of my laptop. The readings do not reflect the power consumption of the wifi card alone. There are many variables that go into a full system's power consumption (for example, which SSD and RAM you have installed and the brightness of your screen), so you shouldn't consider the absolute values here. Instead, you should look at the differences in power consumption between the two cards.

Interestingly, the MT7927 had a lower power consumption than the QCNCM865 during sleep, but when the laptop was awake the QCNCM865 had lower power consumption than the MT7927.

Sleep(ish)

The Framework 13 AMD 7040 laptop only supports s2idle (colloquially called "modern standby") which some critics argue is "not real sleep" (referring to ACPI S3). Regardless of your opinions on s2idle, for the rest of this article I will be referring to s2idle as "sleep".

For this test, I put the laptop to sleep for 10 minutes and measured the battery level before and after to calculate the power consumption.

Idle

For this test, I let the laptop sit idle for 10 minutes and I measured the battery level before and after the test to calculate the power consumption.

Active

For this test, I kept the wifi card active for 10 minutes by continuously sending pings to my router with ping -f -i 0.002 172.16.0.1. This specific invocation requires iputils's version of ping (not inetutils). I measured the battery level before and after the test to calculate the power consumption.

Signal Strength

For the signal strength test, I ran iw dev wlan0 link every second for 10 minutes and parsed out the reported signal strength. This shows that the QCNCM865 reports a better signal strength than the MT7927. The MT7927 going through a wall with powersaving off is the outlier of weakest reported signal strength, but that is likely a consequence of using the 6GHz band, which would attenuate faster than 5GHz.

Bluetooth

The MT7927's bluetooth support has not yet been upstreamed. I added the relevant firmware file but bluetooth still failed to start. The bluetooth works fine on the QCNCM865, so if bluetooth is at all important to you, then you will either want to stick with the QCNCM865, wait a bit before switching to the MT7927, or apply the patches to add bluetooth support for the MT7927 yourself.

Additional Differences

In addition to measuring the performance of the cards, I also dumped information about the cards by reading from /sys, executing iw list, and executing iw reg get. The differences I found noteworthy are below.

Supported Ciphers

The MT7927 supports WEP104 and WEP40, whereas the QCNCM865 does not. That being said, those ciphers should not be in use in 2026, so this difference is inconsequential.

Peer to Peer

The MT7927 claims support for T-DLS whereas the QCNCM865 claims support for RSN-IBSS.

I could not get T-DLS working between two machines both running an MT7927. I had to replace iwd with wpa_supplicant since iwd does not support T-DLS. I managed to get the two devices to establish a link, but once that link was established, all traffic between those two devices immediately stopped.

Test Setup

My test setup consisted of a Framework 13 AMD 7040 laptop with each of the wifi cards, connecting to a Ubiquiti UniFi U7 Pro.

I tested each card in two different locations:

About 6 feet from the access point with a clear line-of-sight.
In another room, going through 1 interior wall.

And I ran each test with both power saving on and power saving off.

To run the tests, I built a bootable live USB that kicks off my scripts, saves the results to disk, and then shuts down the laptop. So the laptop was left undisturbed and unused during each run of the test. For full transparency, you can access my test script here. The code was not meant to be clean/portable/reusable/good. I am only releasing it for full transparency into the process.

I started each test at 70% battery at left it unplugged for the full duration of the test (to support power consumption readings).