Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth [Guide]

[dasboot5]

Pastry,
I know you are trying to be helpful but I cannot post my EFI folder until I have installed High Sierra on my other M.2 drive. Unless you want my windows EFI folder information.. which would not be helpful. I always do full testing of my hardware under Windows first. It is useless to go directly to Mac installation on a dual boot machine if all is not perfect under the OS the motherboard was designed for. The fact is X86 boards were not designed for The Mac operating system. We use the Clover bootloader to get around this with some modifed Kexts. My point is, you insert a piece of hardware, designed to work in an X86 board, it should show up in the device manager, before you install a driver. When booted from the Mac OS, or Linux, the hardware should be observable using LSpci or the Mac System information, IOreg, or DPCIManger and an appropriate kext will have loaded, if present, in the operating system. My case is different, the hardware shows up on one motherboard, but not the one I am building, which is a Gigabyte. The facts are, that Asus does not manufacture their own boards, in house, and have not, for some time. Gigabyte does, MSI does and Asrock does, as well. Something is different about this motherboard in regards to recognition of this particular hardware component, by an OS, and only certain carrier adapters for Apple's Broadcom card are recognized. Figuring out which adapter is universal, is my task at hand, and reading what has been done before, is the only help in this situation. OSXwifi has done this, I believe, and you pay for their research and guarantee that their hardware solution for using Apple's Architectural design of Broadcom cards will work. Since the carrier(s) they sell are like no other Chinese design, I have seen, they must have worked with the manufacturer, and have exclusivity, as the card, or clone of it, does not exist for sale outside of their store(s) websites including Ebay, Newegg, Ali-Express or Amazon.

 

[pastrychef]

Pastry,
I know you are trying to be helpful but I cannot post my EFI folder until I have installed High Sierra on my other M.2 drive. Unless you want my windows EFI folder information.. which would not be helpful. I always do full testing of my hardware under Windows first. It is useless to go directly to Mac installation on a dual boot machine if all is not perfect under the OS the motherboard was designed for. The fact is X86 boards were not designed for The Mac operating system. We use the Clover bootloader to get around this with some modifed Kexts. My point is, you insert a piece of hardware, designed to work in an X86 board, it should show up in the device manager, before you install a driver. When booted from the Mac OS, or Linux, the hardware should be observable using LSpci or the Mac System information, IOreg, or DPCIManger and an appropriate kext will have loaded, if present, in the operating system. My case is different, the hardware shows up on one motherboard, but not the one I am building, which is a Gigabyte. The facts are, that Asus does not manufacture their own boards, in house, and have not, for some time. Gigabyte does, MSI does and Asrock does, as well. Something is different about this motherboard in regards to recognition of this particular hardware component, by an OS, and only certain carrier adapters for Apple's Broadcom card are recognized. Figuring out which adapter is universal, is my task at hand, and reading what has been done before, is the only help in this situation. OSXwifi has done this, I believe, and you pay for their research and guarantee that their hardware solution for using Apple's Architectural design of Broadcom cards will work. Since the carrier(s) they sell are like no other Chinese design, I have seen, they must have worked with the manufacturer, and have exclusivity, as the card, or clone of it, does not exist for sale outside of their store(s) websites including Ebay, Newegg, Ali-Express or Amazon.

What motherboard is giving you problems with PCI-e Wi-Fi/Bluetooth?

What difference does it make which manufacturers make their own motherboards? Isn't the design what's important? I think it's Foxconn that makes Macs, but they are still Apple Macintoshes.

The Apple Wi-Fi/Bluetooth cards are just M.2 cards with custom pinout and connectors. M.2 is PCI-e with different pinout and connectors. The PCI-e adaptors just convert the pinouts and connector. If you really had the patience, it's probably possible to connect one of the Apple Wi-Fi/Bluetooth cards directly to a PCI-e slot using jumper wires. Those PCI-e adaptors don't even need any IC chips.

 

[dasboot5]

Pastry,
I am in total agreement it should make no differnce, but it does, with this hardware component. Foxconn does make Apple's boards, and you are correct. Foxconn is major and rebrands for many companies using that company's architectural design. Apple's board firmware and or Bios is what makes it unique and it is non-adjustable to compensate for differences in third party hardware which is its downside. Here is an interesting thread from TonyMac on a Asrockwifi situation: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...esnt-asrock-fatal1ty-z97x-killer-mobo.203309/ My board is a Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7
and the carriers and cards that do not work in this board, in any slot, work perfectly in a Asus Strix Z270G Gaming. As I said, the new Fenvi FV- T919 card I just puchased and received, works perfectly in this Gigabyte Z370 but it is a 4 antenna Apple Broadcom wifi card, on Fenvi's carrier. The OsXwifi card does work as well that is in another machine I own. Here is a link to my current build which is still not finished: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/a-g5-work-in-progress-template-when-finished.256631/

 

[pastrychef]

Pastry,
I am in total agreement it should make no differnce, but it does, with this hardware component. Foxconn does make Apple's boards, and you are correct. Foxconn is major and rebrands for many companies using that company's architectural design. Apple's board firmware and or Bios is what makes it unique and it is non-adjustable to compensate for differences in third party hardware which is its downside. Here is an interesting thread from TonyMac on a Asrockwifi situation: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...esnt-asrock-fatal1ty-z97x-killer-mobo.203309/ My board is a Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7
and the carriers and cards that do not work in this board, in any slot, work perfectly in a Asus Strix Z270G Gaming. As I said, the new Fenvi FV- T919 card I just puchased and received, works perfectly in this Gigabyte Z370 but it is a 4 antenna Apple Broadcom wifi card, on Fenvi's carrier. The OsXwifi card does work as well that is in another machine I own. Here is a link to my current build which is still not finished: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/a-g5-work-in-progress-template-when-finished.256631/

I used the Apple Bootcamp drivers to get my Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card working in Windows. I never bothered checking Device Manager in Windows to see if the card showed up there.

 

[9000RPM]

Just got my Lenovo FRU 04x6020 BCM94352Z. I had the Airport BrcmFixup and FakePCIID_Broadcom_WiFI already applied and upon startup, native WiFi is working.

Below are pictures of the BCM94352Z(left) and BCM94350ZAE(right). Both are Lenovo branded. The documentation for my Lenovo Yoga700 doesn't list the BCM94352Z as supported but it works. It lists the BCM94350ZAE as supported, that's why I originally bought this one. And RehabMan said he put in an "unsupported" Lenovo WiFi card in his so it seems like whoever is writing the codes are just putting in a list of all Lenovo FRU wifi cards.

I recently got a MSi laptop and thought I'd test the BCM94350ZAE. WiFi worked OOB but I had to use the kext to activate bluetooth.

 

[dasboot5]

I used the Apple Bootcamp drivers to get my Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card working in Windows. I never bothered checking Device Manager in Windows to see if the card showed up there

.

A driver will not suddenly make a device that is not seen by any OS appear. It has to be detected and the Bootcamp drivers do not check for a device or to see if it is compatible, it just installs. The Bootcamp driver is a modified Broadcom driver. The last downloadable Bootcamp set is not even for Windows 10. It was posted in 2015 and the driver and the .inf file has a 2013 date on it and has a driver version number of 6.30.223.215 provided by Broadcom. I am using that driver on 4 machines. The Fenvi version .inf has a driver version number of 7.35.118.25 and is dated 3/5/2015 and in a Win 10 folder rather than a Win 8 folder. The Bootcamp 6 drivers are the latest, but they cannot be downloaded directly unless you use Brigadier. I have never tried this from the Mac OS using Clover, but I would assume it is the same as the Fenvi driver. BTW Windows 7,8,8.1 and 10 are all variants of Vista, the underlying code there are all based on, none of them are complete rewrites, this is why Win8 8.1 drivers usually install and work on 10.

 

[pastrychef]

.

A driver will not suddenly make a device that is not seen by any OS appear. It has to be detected and the Bootcamp drivers do not check for a device or to see if it is compatible, it just installs. The Bootcamp driver is a modified Broadcom driver. The last downloadable Bootcamp set is not even for Windows 10. It was posted in 2015 and the driver and the .inf file has a 2013 date on it and has a driver version number of 6.30.223.215 provided by Broadcom. I am using that driver on 4 machines. The Fenvi version .inf has a driver version number of 7.35.118.25 and is dated 3/5/2015 and in a Win 10 folder rather than a Win 8 folder. The Bootcamp 6 drivers are the latest, but they cannot be downloaded directly unless you use Brigadier. I have never tried this from the Mac OS using Clover, but I would assume it is the same as the Fenvi driver. BTW Windows 7,8,8.1 and 10 are all variants of Vista, the underlying code there are all based on, none of them are complete rewrites, this is why Win8 8.1 drivers usually install and work on 10.

Like I said, I never bothered to check Device Manager for the presence of the card.

I use the last downloadable Bootcamp drivers with Windows 10 and it works for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I never looked for or tried any updated versions.

 

[dasboot5]

As I said Bootcamp 6.0 is the Windows 10 specific package and Apple pulled direct downloading of this package. The last downloadable package is Bootcamp 5.1.1769 on Apple's site which says it is for:
"This download contains the Windows Support Software (Windows Drivers) you need to support 64 bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 on your Mac."
It does Not say 10, and the folder that contains the wifi driver is for 8.1, 10 is not in the title. The Fenvi windows driver is in a folder titled "Windows 10". If the driver is not specifically written for 10, just as Mac kexts are specific, you are just hoping you have good luck, and you did, as I have, and it works. But there is a newer version in th B.C. 6.0 package.

 

[dasboot5]

I use the last downloadable Bootcamp drivers with Windows 10 and it works for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I never looked for or tried any updated versions.

For the sake of accuracy I downloaded the last downloadable Bootcamp package on Apple's site; 5.1.1769 and as I said, the .inf file says the driver version inside the install is: Broadcom Version 6.30.223.215 dated 12/13/2013 which is a Win 8 driver.
Tonight I went to Github and downloaded "Brigadier" and determined how to use it, as it is a Terminal script. There are two parts to it, and you must first extract you machine signature into it, so it will download the latest package for that signature. I am working off of my Z97 machine which has Sierra on in and it is using the 14,2 Imac signature. You then start the 2nd part in Terminal, it will download the latest Win 10 Bootcamp 6.X package from an Apple ESD directy from Apple's server, in this case, it was Bootcamp 031-55710 which is a Bootcamp 6X package. In Terminal, it shows the signature list compatibilities for this newer Win 10 Package, which was, as follows: (copied directly from the Terminal Window during the ESD download, unpacking and conversion to dmg,: [ done when booted to 10.12.6 ]

Distribution 031-55710 supports the following models: MacBook8,1, MacBookAir5,1, MacBookAir5,2, MacBookAir6,1, MacBookAir6,2, MacBookAir7,1, MacBookAir7,2, MacBookPro9,1, MacBookPro9,2, MacBookPro11,1, MacBookPro11,2, MacBookPro11,3, MacBookPro11,4, MacBookPro11,5, MacBookPro12,1, MacPro6,1, Macmini6,1, Macmini6,2, Macmini7,1, iMac13,1, iMac13,2, iMac13,3, iMac14,1, iMac14,2, iMac14,3, iMac14,4, iMac15,1.
The lastest IMacs are 15,x so this is the newest, or close to it.
The driver in this Brigadier downloaded package is version, I extracted manually using 7zip is:
DriverVer=07/24/2015, 7.35.118.40
CatalogFile = BCM43XX.CAT
CatalogFile.NTamd64=BCM43XX64.CAT
7.35.118.40 is newer than 6.30.223.215 dated 12/13/2013 which is what most users are being steared to. Further, the the Fevi Win 10 download on their site has the same version number 7.35.118.40.

 

[prabs99]

I installed a fresh copy of High Sierra on my Elitebook 840 G1 using Rehabman's guide. I replaced my wifi card with BCM94352 HMB/AzureWave AW-CE123H. Everything works, except for Bluetooth after sleep. Can someone tell me what I did wrong?

Thanks