 |
Sony Vaio VPC-SE2
MonkeyBook Pro
The Quest for Air Speed
Dual Channel 5Ghz WiFi & BT 4.0 Upgrade
|
Since perfecting the OSX build for my Sony SE2C5E Vaio Laptop (MonkeyBook Pro) I found my-self getting more and more frustrated at the poor WiFi connection speed (between 40 - 130Mb/sec despite using a good 2.4Ghz/5.0Ghz Asus RT56U router) I also suffered from poor bluetooth performance when using more than one bluetooth device such as BT headphones and a Apple Magic Mouse.
When it comes to 5Ghz WiFi and hackingtosh systems our options have been very limited. For the past few months I've been experimenting with different WiFi/BT mPCIe cards. I wanted at the very minimum dual channel 5Ghz (300Mbs) and if possible Bluetooth 4.0. Until very recently it was almost impossible to find a single card that offered both of these features
and was supported by OSX.
Of the various cards I tested, some gave good 5Ghz performance but no bluetooth at all, some cards had good 2.4Ghz WiFi and bluetooth 2.0 or 3.0 but no 5Ghz, some cards BT 4.0 works great but the WiFi is unsupported ..... you get the picture, other options where to use a USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle but that means loosing one of the three USB ports and was never really a consideration for me.
Now there is a new combo mPCIe radio card on the block that's almost perfect, giving us at last, all the latest and greatest wireless features that Apple has kindly baked in to OSX such as AirDrop and AirPlay .... it all works .. fast and seamless and no longer feels flakey or a gimmick.
Azurewave AW-CE123H
802.11ac/nbg WiFi+BT Broadcom BCM4352 867Mbps Bluetooth 4.0
 |
- Chipset: Broadcom BCM4352
- Interface: Mini PCIe (half)
- 802.11A/B/G/N+ AC 867 Mb/sec
- Dual Band 2.4 and 5.0 Ghz
- Bluetooth 4.0 specification
- 11n WiFi upto to 300Mb/sec
|
This card has been around since Jan 2014 but availability still seems to be quite limited and prices vary widely so search for a good deal, after a bit of searching I got one for £27.00 ($45.00) delivered from the US on eBay, but there are similar deals with Hong Kong and China suppliers.
This new card will give a huge boost in WiFi performance (especially if your router supports the AC WiFi standard)
and full support for the relatively new Bluetooth 4.0 standard. I work with a lot of large files from my Synology NAS, so for me an increase in WiFi connectivity speed has improved my workflow and reduced network access times significantly.
The card works 100% perfect, waking from sleep and re-connecting to WiFi and BT devices takes just one or two seconds. You can turn both radios on and off without rebooting using the front mounted 'Wireless' switch on your laptop or individually using the options on the appropriate menu icon, it is natively supported by the OSX power management processes.
Update 12-May 2014: It would appear that tThere are several different variants of the Azureware CE123H card available from HP, Dell, and otrhers, all of them seem to use the same WiFi chipset (Broadcom 94352) but some use a lower specification chipset for the Bluetooth side of the card. Be sure that the card you buy, supports the Broadcom BT4 chipset, if you do inadvertently purchase one of these variants and find the method below does not work for you, please see
@yuchen1211 post
here.
Disclaimer: This guide should work for just about any PC based Hackingtosh running OSX Mavericks as long as your systems BIOS does not exclude the Azureware CE123H card via a black or white list.
I am not responsible for any loss of data and/or damage you may inflict whilst following my guide.
Make sure you have a full backup - should go without saying but please make sure you have a full Time Machine and/or Carbon Copy backup of your OSX startup drive. Nothing here should cause a real problem but things can and do go wrong - You have been warned.
I would recommend removing the existing radio card first, if installing on a desktop or non Sony S laptop then follow Steps 1 to 3, then shutdown and fit the new card, connect the aerial leads and power up, boot OSX with the -f boot flag.
Installation:
Step-1: I recommend installing the kexts before installing the hardware. In order to use the card we must first make sure we have a vanilla
IONetworkngFamily.kext & IO80211Family.kext, in /S/L/E. If you don't have a backup of these files and you know that the versions in /S/L/E are not vanilla, you can use
Pacafist to extract the files from your latest OSX Installer package or OSX Combo Update package.
In addition to vanilla
IONetworkngFamily.kext & IO80211Family.kext, you will also need the following three custom kext's: -
TolediaAPRT.kext &
BCM4352.kext from Toledia's Reop
here.
BTFirmwareUploader.kext from EMlyDinEsH's Post
here.
Always use the very latest version of the above three kexts (especially if running Yosemite and install all the kext's via Kext Utility and wait for it to rebuild the cache, when done quit Kext Utility.
Step-2: Open a terminal window and apply these two binary patches from the command line, simply copy and paste each one in turn to your terminal command line and press return:-
Code:
sudo perl -pi -e 's|\x01\x58\x54|\x01\x58\x58|g' /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AirPortBrcm4360.kext/Contents/MacOS/AirPortBrcm4360
sudo perl -pi -e 's|\x30\x6B\x10\x00\x00\x75\x0D|\x30\x6B\x10\x00\x00\x90\x90|' /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AirPortBrcm4360.kext/Contents/MacOS/AirPortBrcm4360
- The 1st patch enables the 5Ghz radio channels by changing the County Code from 'XT' to 'US'
- The 2nd patch allows the card to identified as 'AirPort Extreme' allowing Airdrop support.
Huge thanks to SKVO for his investigations and for creating the above two patches.
Step-3: Exit and close the terminal window and re-run Kext Utility to re-build the caches and fix permissions one last time, when its finished you can shutdown (Power Off) the laptop.
Only for Sony Vaio S series Laptop
Step-4: Remove the access panel from the bottom of the laptop, as an added precaution you should also remove the battery before changing any hardware.
Unplug the two aerial connectors and remove the securing screw from the radio card. With the card removed use a small pair of pliers to remove the plastic standoff and refit it to the same side on your new mPCIe card. Locate the card in the mPCIe slot and re-fit the securing screw, make sure that both aerials are connected securely, refit the battery and back panel and switch on.
Accessing the mPCIe card is very easy on Sony SE2
Finish: Power up your system, I recommend booting OSX with '-f' the first time after fitting the new mPCIe card, if all has gone well you should now have full dual channel 5Ghz WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 available.
System info report on WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0
No DSDT changes are required as we are using Toeldia's Airport Injector kext, Bluetooth transport control is enabled by the kext's so there is no need to edit any info.plists so you can turn the BT on and off via the icon as well as the switch.
A big thank you goes out to
Toledia,
EMlyDinEsH and
Skvo for helping me achieve the final working method.
Usability
I'm now able to connect to my Router (Asus N56U) all the time at 300Mbs over 5Ghz and its been a big boost, The Bluetooth 4.0 on this card is very very good, I have been able to stream a 1080P movie from my Synology NAS over 5Ghz @ 300Mbs .... listening to the movie via Bluetooth (stereo) headphones with my Apple Magic Touch Mouse and MagicTouch Pad connected via Bluetooth 4.0 - and all working without any issues or delays except for a few nags about audio quality but thats a limitation of the BT standard.
I've also installed this card in three of my Gigabyte ITX based hackingtosh systems (GA-H77N-WiFi & GA-H87N-WiFi) and all work 100% including sleep and wake.
I don't think i've ever experienced such STABLE wireless performance in any OS till now ..... at least in my house ... upgrading to this card has been money well spent, sure its expensive when compared to the lesser mPCIe cards and cheep USB BT dongles but like most things in life you get what you pay for.
802.11AC Performance
In June 2014 I updated my router to a
ASUS RT-AC68U, its a bit pricey for a home router but it is without doubt one of the best domestic routers currently on the market.
Since I already owned a ASUS RT-N56U setting up the new router was a breeze , once ready I eagerly booted up my Sony MonkeyBook to test the AC capabilities. OSX booted up and immediately connect to the new router at a speed of 867 Mbs.
This is almost three times faster WiFi performance than my old router, accessing files from my NAS are notable quicker, as of course is any internet access. I have also seen an increase in the throughput on all traffic to the internet so clearly the dual core CPU of the RT-AC86U router works well. One thing I did have to do was to manually configure the 5Ghz channel, with it set to 'auto' it selected channel 100 which is also used by a neighbour and WiFi speed was limited to 300Mbs, once I manually set it to Channel 116 I started to see the higher 'AC' speeds.
I didn't have to do anything in OSX to get the AC standard working, as long as you follow my install guide above, you too should see similar performance when using a AC capable router.
My three Gigabyte ITX based Hackingtosh systems (H77N-WiFi & H87N-WiFi) are also fitted with AW-CE123H WiFi/BT4 cards and connect at speeds between 876 and 660 Mbs depending on the location in the house.
I've been very impressed with the improved speed and response of my wireless network by updating to the RT-AC68U router and the AW-123CE mPCIe WiFi/BT4 card, I can fully recommend this configuration to anyone looking for a solution to slow WiFi performance.
Cheers
Jay
