I have use QCA9994 on J3060 (X86) board, works very good on CT driver and classic firmware, but VHT160 on current branch master OpenWrt is broken (on 18.06.2 stable works).
So I assume Compex WLE1216V5-20-I ?
Its working stable now (even at high speed transfer)?
Are you the author of the youtube vid with the pcie extension etc? I'm contemplating a build using this pcie card and the purpose is primarily high speed wifi (80MB+), would appreciate your thoughts since it seems you've been using this system for a few months.
Did you try the card on bare metal (I see you using VMs) and allocate more than 128MB ram?
I have try it in Windows Server 2016/2019 Hyper-V under OpenWrt (it works), but server is in very long distance from wireless clients, and now i make another miniPC (Q3060G2-P board) with emergency 4G connection and 2.4/5 GHz WiFi in center of my apartments...
Compex WLE1216V5-20-I with the latest 18.06.2 works very stable and with 60-100 MB/s on Broadcom BCM4360 WiFi adapter, but it's VERY HOT, with max rate (~100 MB/s) in 30 minutes on open air temps in chip hits 130'C. It needs AIR cooling.
That rules out putting it inside APU2 and other small passively cooled cases.
At 130C, even if its attached to the enclosure for passive cooling it would heat up the entire box and possibly overheat the main CPU.
I wonder if this would make a better buy: http://shop.compex.com.sg/wireless-modules/mu-mimo/wle1216v5-23.html
Its a "reference" QCA design, and bigger size could make it dissipate heat better..
Thanks for the info
I have use it in close box, with heat pipe and small cooler, it's not too much heat internal components and can be used in close box (just nee to do some holes for passive air cycle). WLE1216v5-23 is too big for miniPC. You can search boards on MediaTek MTK MT7615N (board is cost about 64 USD), there is no VHT160 (for now, but chip itself support it), but on VHT80 it's enough fast (i have get about 80 MB/s) and chip is very cold, and seems that for now it's supports by OpenWrt.
Thanks for your insights.
This? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4x4-802-11ac-Wave2-1733Mbps-MiniPCIE-NIC/32817490188.html
So you prefer this card over the compex QCA9994 you have?
See stability is my main concern, while the mt76 driver is maturing very nicely, I need something stable now, and from my experience with a few devices, QCA devices seem to have a more stable driver. So I need a card that can handle heavy load at high speeds like 80MBps.
mt7615n support in mt76 is very, very new -while I have no personal experience with it yet- I wouldn't expect it to be on par with ath10k or mwlwifi straight away/ for the next couple of months. Long term it has a better prospect, given that it relies much more on common and well tested code (mac80211 with a shallow firmware blob), but new code needs a while to mature (mt7615n support has been largely contributed by Mediatek, which is also a nice sign for the future).
QCA9984/9994 for now is absolutely stable with CT driver and classic firmware, if you want stability in OpenWrt — i think it's better, because drivers is finely tuned a years on OpenWrt. But i have an Xiaomi R3P with same MTN7615 and it works as AP more than 1 year 24/7 without any reboots (no hangs or lags), all modern devices properly connected (as robot vacuum cleaner, smart devices, tabs, phones, PC's, notebooks), i think that is very good wireless chip with good potentiality and absolutely not worse, than QCA9984, but more cheap and cold.
And one more, i seen an dual band switching card version on MT7615, you can choose witch frequency run module. or run for VHT80 2x2 5 GHz + 2x2 2.4 GHz, it's very good advantage over one band QCA chips.
Is almost stable with CT driver and classic firmware.. 
If you have a PS4 Pro, can't connect to CT driver. [INFO] Archer C2600 + PS4 Pro Wifi + ath10k-ct drivers
CT firmware is very unstable on 18.06.2, and, for few weeks ago, i have try it on current master branch — nothing changed, WiFi module is hangs randomly, for me the best is CT driver with non-CT firmware.
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Very helpful.
The MTK card is also significantly cheaper. One last thing I wanted to ask, compex had a support forum not long ago, and on it I saw some complains about generally poor range on compex cards (the 9994 specifically). They have since taken the forum down.
How do you find the range/signal on the 9994? In general and compared to the R3P?
I don't seen any posts about poor range of QCA9994. It's hard to say for sure, many factors can act on range of signal (cables, antennas, channels interference). My second system on QCA9994 is building now (all components is just connected and putted on table "as is"), i can say for 100% is only after few weeks, when i finally make a shielded case, place all components inside and will do true tests in one position of each AP.
R3P has a good range of 5GHz signal, but 2.4 is acceptable poor. There is 3 selectable settings of signal power in GUI for each band, but i can't see a real difference between them. In overall, i am really like hardware of R3P (2/4HT core CPU/512 MB RAM/256 MB FLASH/Gigabit LAN/USB 3.0/stable 5 GHz wifi), and, in future - with fully support of OpenWrt, it will be a very good performance AP for very cheap price (sometimes on JD.COM i have seen an 50$ sale for R3P).
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Will keep an eye on this thread, please update when you get a chance to do your tests.
Thanks for the insights 
has anyone managed to make 160mhz successfully and reliably working? I tried with latest dev build, but still adapter refuses to come up 
Can somebody confirm that QCA9984 works on 100 channel?
It does in ETSI.
seems like a common limit, although it should be possible to get quite a bit more out of it.
i've also got about 80-90MB/s with WLE900VX running ath10k connected to Archer C7 v1 running original fw. probably needed to run compex card with propreiatry driver to get close to 800-900Mbps.
otherwise it performs quite decent, even with single TCP stream it reached 650-700Mbps, while under same conditions QCA9862 gets about 180Mbps only with single TCP stream (but does get up to 520Mbps with 10 streams).
as it is full-size form factor it heats up significantly slower than half-size card
so for anyone looking which card to get i can safely recommend WLE900VX
Did you do any kind of additional performance tuning with hostapd parameters or config parameters besides vanila ones? Which RF cabels did you use to connect compex with Antena?
I also build one x64 router with KANSUNG 3865U CPU. Maybe we can exchange some information!
I did with @hnyman 4.19 kernel test build (OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r11607-c7fb12beb1) however:
- it takes quite a time for 5GHz interface to come up
- I have no client capable of VHT160 hence not possible to really test it
A DFS scan, which is mandatory for using DFS channels (something you basically can't avoid with 160 MHz channels) takes at the very least 1 minute, before the AP interface can come up (in some rare cases up to 10 minutes). If DFS events are registered, either during the initial scan or later during normal operations, the AP must immediately vacate the affected frequencies (regardless of what it's doing at the moment), so you may lose 160 MHz capabilities any time.
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