Unknown Wifi device ID on Gigabyte Aorus B450 Pro Wifi board

Thanks for the additional info folks.

I think I'm pretty convinced it's a 9260 now. Over the last day or two I've been looking into the possibility of swapping it out with an 8265 as mentioned in my previous post. Come to find out, the screws for doing this are on the back of the board. I theorize that loosening them will allow you to take the metal cover off.

I'm still looking into whether anyone's actually tried to attempt this swap yet - and I haven't entirely ruled out doing so myself - but to be honest I'm kind of tired of researching it anymore and I'm not keen to pull the mobo out of the case again (especially since last time I tried to do cable management, I tried to disconnect the USB3.0 cable and managed to pull the connector off of its pins with it... I feel lucky that the ports still work at this point). So I picked up a USB NIC for the time being:
TP-LINK Archer T3U AC1300 Mini Wireless - Micro Center
Works well so far. Initially it kept failing to connect to my 5G band and froze the machine when I tried to disable/re-enable it. Then I connected it to my 2.4G band and evidently that fixed whatever problem it was having - next attempt to connect to 5G worked and it's given no problems since then (knock on wood).

I'm waiting on a few more people to get back to me (including Intel and Gigabyte) and once that happens, I'll likely summarize my findings and mark this solved (as it were) unless I'm struck by the urgent desire to try the 8265 swap (or the USB NIC craps out).


EDIT: In case it wasn't obvious by this point, the actual model of the board I have is B450 I AORUS Pro Wifi. Apparently the regular B450 (no I) is a bigger board. Not sure how I missed this, but I can't edit the thread title now.

Ok, well I'm marking this thread as "solved" since I found the basic answer to my question, even though it wasn't one I particularly liked.

If you are coming to this thread looking for help on how to make the Gigabyte Aurous B450 I PRO WIFI board work for Win7 (not the B450 non-I version - that was my mistake in the thread title), take note of the below.

• First off, I'm assuming if you've gotten this far, then like me, you've dealt with the USB compatibility issues with modern processors already (in my case, Ryzen 7). If not, go to this thread by SIW2 and run the offered there to modify your boot media: Update your Win 7 installation media. On page 59 there's a modded USB driver posted by SIW2 which is what I needed to inject.
• Assuming you get as far as finishing installing the OS - note that the Wifi card on this model is a Intel 9260. This card is NOT compatible with Win7 (unless someone successfully makes a modded driver in the future). Some of these mobos have the card model on a sticker on the side of the metal cover behind the antenna mounts, but in my case it did not.
• The last Intel wifi card which was compatible is the 8265. In theory it should work if you bought one of them and installed it in the M.2 slot on the motherboard, but I have NOT tested this, and I'm not aware of anyone who has. On one hand, it's possible that something else in the chipset will be incompatible with the 8265. On the other hand, there are 8265 drivers on the DVD and the autorun app on the DVD lists the card (incorrectly) as an 8265, so that's definitely a point in favor of it being compatible, should you choose to go this route.
• The wifi card is located under the above mentioned metal cover (or at least, per the mobo manual, that's where the M.2 slot is). There are screws underneath the board which would presumably loosen the cover so you can swap out the card.
• Ultimately your simplest option is probably going to be getting a USB NIC. I went with this one for its comparatively low profile vis-a-vis my case: TP-LINK Archer T3U AC1300 Mini Wireless - Micro Center . It works pretty well, though in my particular case, it failed to connect to my 5G band at first and I had to put it on my 2.4G band before it would connect to the 5G without complaint. Also, I've caught it disconnecting once or twice necessitating the NIC be disabled/re-enabled, but this seems to be a rare occurrence.
• Unrelated, but just FYI for anyone else using this board: the RGB controller app is basically useless in Win7. You can install the Gigabyte App Center and RGB Fusion from the DVD, but in my case, it immediately crashed when trying to launch it. I also found an installer for an earlier version of RGB Fusion which still works with the newer App Center, but this one only got as far as a "please wait..." message and never loaded up. So if you have RGB components, prepare for being unable to sync them until/unless someone makes a fully functional universal RGB controller (which at time of writing, it seems like a couple people are trying, but nothing totally there yet).

Since my last post, Intel has followed up with me once or twice, but they couldn't tell me much more than I already knew, nor were they able to look up their own device by the hardware IDs (good service though). They kept referring me to Gigabyte, who at time of writing still hasn't answered me at all. I don't expect any miracles, but on the off-chance they say something remotely useful I'll edit this post.