Maximum PC

I'm looking to get a wireless adapter for a desktop. The desktop is on the first floor of the house, and the router is on the second floor. The router is a Netgear WNDR4500. Windows 7 OS.

I'm looking for the best wireless adapter in terms of maintaining a connection, throughput, and speed. Suggestions?

This website should give you a start, at least: http://wireless-adapter-review.toptenreviews.com/

I prefer USB adapters over to add-on cards, as you can move the adapter around if you have an extension cable (and a side belief that you'll have more signal quality issues considering there's a big honkin' piece of metal next to the antennae). And as long as it conforms to USB's maximum wire length spec, you won't have to worry about signal degradation.

Thanks!

I prefer wireless ethernet bridges for desktops.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/41136 ... ss-adapter

http://www.buy.com/prod/levelone-wbr-68 ... 40919.html
http://www.buy.com/prod/zyxel-mwr102-wi ... 81385.html

That is a cruddy article as there is zero 'how we tested' info! I kind of wondered if they might have used a Cisco/Linksys product for testing the data transfer rates? Oh well....

I like!!!!

I keep wondering where the AC protocol products are?

Well, I like the idea of wireless bridges if just that you don't need drivers. But it's extra cables and does require planning because, in my case, I can't plant it closer the wireless spot as there's no socket.

Also, unless you're running a network that requires really high bandwidth... or you share your wireless with 7 other people... I wouldn't get excited over 802.11ac. Yes, faster! But you might as well get excited for PCI-Express 4.0... oh wait, nothing's using up even PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (as far as the GTX 480 goes, Tom's went down to x4 on PCIe 2.0 and it only took like a 10% at worst hit).

EDIT: Well, I don't know if this was mentioned in the linked post, but I found one more reason for wireless bridge.

USB 2.0, which most USB wireless adapters use, has an effective throughput of about 30MBps because of USB overhead (it's like 30%-40% of the bandwidth). 30MBps is 240Mbps, so you're bottlenecking if you use anything more than a single antennae 802.11n adapter.

Ethernet at worst has 7% for TCP, 5% for UDP. Though the bridge has to be gigabit speeds, as Fast Ethernet is only 100Mbps, which is worse than USB2.0.

Here are a couple more wireless ethernet bridges (yes, they do make them quite small these days, even nano-sized).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833381029
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833315095

USB Hi-Speed (USB 2.0) 480 Mbit/s 60 MB/s
USB super speed (USB 3.0) 5000 Mbit/s 625 MB/s
Fast Ethernet (100BASE-X) 100 Mbit/s 12.5 MB/s
Gigabit Ethernet (1000BASE-X) 1000 Mbit/s 125 MB/s
IEEE 802.11g 54 Mbit/s 6.75 MB/s
IEEE 802.11n 600 Mbit/s 75 MB/s [4x4]
IEEE 802.11ac 6930 Mbit/s 850 MB/s [4x4?]

source

Dang LatiosXT, you keep playing with those number and shooting down my misconceptions. Learned something new and it isn't even noon.

The one I was eying yesterday.