X86 2.5gb-e MiniPC + PCie AX card suggestions

I'm looking into upgrade my R7800 to an ~$200 aliexpress x86 intel jasper lake based 4x 2.5gb-e miniPC to use as both a router and AP, just wondering if anyone has had success/stability with openwrt on such a setup? It seems like if I want wireless AX support I'll have to buy a MT7915 pcie card, but I'm unsure of which reasonably priced MT7915 cards that will just slot in and work, or if this is even the path to go at all. I mainly just want more performance for file serving, the R7800 works good but I can only get about 60-80mb/s through samba over ethernet. Currently looking at the AsiaRF AW7915-NPD card

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Then keep the r7800 for networking (both wifi and wired) only and buy a small form x86 for file sharing. I use a similar setup for a few years and I'm very happywith it

Well I mean I could be doing that already, but the goal is to pass off the R7800 to someone else that needs a new router and get myself a nice upgrade at the same time, I also want the 2.5gbit ethernet + AX in one box if I can, wanting to use as little space as possible. It just seems like I'd end up buying another R7800 for the other person since it still appears to be the best ARM option, and I don't wanna do that so I wanna make the jump to a low power x86 box if I can. I really like using the R7800 as a fserve since it's a very neat convenient setup, it's just not powerful enough

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There's 802.11ax wifi AP mPCI-E cards

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Outsourcing the AP functionality still makes sense, both functionally (better placement, better antennas/ antenna orientation) and economically (you can get a new OpenWrt supported 802.11ax device between 50-70 EUR, two mini-PCIe cards plus pigtails plus antennas would be considerably more expensive, as would finding a mainboard with two mini-PCIe slots in the first place).

Right now I'm looking at MT7921K AX 2x2 m-PCIe cards around $30 and they're dual band 2.4/5ghz with only 2 antenna connections, and the antenna wires to connect to the casing for external antenna mounting are another $10, it seems like I'll only need 1 m-pcie unless I'm missing something?

A typical modern router has at least two radios, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz - 6 GHz soon to follow (already existing, but still very high-end, read expensive). With IoT devices still being largely 2.4 GHz only, providing 5 GHz only AP services might not be overly useful.

With DBDC one (modern-) card can do this (and some mt79xx cards fall into this category), but at the expense of its abilities to use all rx-/tx- chains (making two 2x2 cards out of one 4x4 card) and affecting its abilities to do Mu-MIMO and beamforming. So yes, this can 'work', but at the expense of the expected performance values of "802.11ax".

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I see.. looking into this more it seems like MT7921K is still too early in development also, I guess I'll skip on the AX mpci-e card and pick up a cheap 2x2 AX AP instead

As someone already said, repurpose the 7800 to AP.

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Separate wifi from router

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