Any 802.11n (internal) cards that do 300Mbs over 2.4Ghz?

Hey guys..

Recently, I have been less than happy with my Intel N card; i have connection issues, and thanks to Intel, can't maximize my N routers speed (since they wont do 300Mbs over 2.4Ghz). I did some research, but came up short. Is there anything out there that I am missing? I really don't want an external card, since the laptop is constantly moving in and out of my case..

Any ideas would be great. Thanks!

 

You need to use the 5GHz band, I believe, to get the full 300MBit/s.

 

You'll be limited by the speed of your hard drive/s anyway.

Even a Sager NP9262 with Raid-0 striped drives can only hit 115 mbps peak and roughly 80 mbps sustained.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4391

Swap those 320 gb 5400 rpm drives for 7200 rpm drives and you might eek out another 10-15 mbps.

Lets be kind and call it 100mbps sustained from striped harddisks.

No one will ever reach the maximum theoretical throughput of 300mbps of 802.11n.

There is a policy in the new 802.11n version 1.10 draft that dictates that ANY attempt by neighboring legacy devices to transmit data(b/g) would force an 802.11n device to scale back to 20 MHz operation for a period of 30 minutes. If you have any wi-fi devices nearby,(routers, cell phones with wi-fi, laptops, etc) this effectively means that 802.11n draft 1.10 devices will almost never get to operate in 40 MHz mode, this cuts their speed roughly in half.

So, you're limited to a maximum of half 802.11n sustained, which would be 150 mbps, again, theoretically.

Even with a top tier $3000+ laptop with striped harddrives, you can't possibly saturate a gimped N card, let alone if it were operating in 40 mhz mode.

Stop worrying and enjoy the speed.

 

Atheros AG5008 internal pre N card paired w/ a new Dlink Pre N router (based on the Atheros chipset) do a search in in the networking group

they are raving over it

 

Nope, some peole have reached the 300Mbps. I actullay tried with 2.4GHz and I got 144Mbps.

Now, can you please correlate the HDD involvement in the router-nic connectivity?

Data is procecessed in the RAM, so once the RAM is in charge the HDD has nothing to do anymore (unless you have litle RAM and the OS need to use the HDD to temporarily store data in it) and the RAM is way, way faster than the HDD.

 

Now, can you please correlate the HDD involvement in the router-nic connectivity?

Data is procecessed in the RAM, so once the RAM is in charge the HDD has nothing to do anymore (unless you have litle RAM and the OS need to use the HDD to temporarily store data in it) and the RAM is way, way faster than the HDD.

Sure, if you're saving say, a PSD from photoshop to a network drive, its being sent from RAM.

But if i'm sending a 10 gb folder full of AVIs to/from a laptop to a NAS or to another machine on the network, thats all coming to/from a harddrive, not ram.

Any large file transfers are going to spin up the harddrives to transfer.

Video editing? Harddrive
3d modeling? Harddrive
Large files? Harddrive

Word/Excel/photo files saved from the app? Ok, RAM.

Seriously, take a 700 mb AVI from your desktop/laptop and copy it to another machine on the network, watch your HDD activity light go solid or flicker extremely rapidly.

 

I too think the atheros card does indeed do the magic w/ routers like d-link that also use the atheros chip.

Also, like brand router/cards like D-Link can hit 300mbps-- but the those are usually external cards..........

 

Do the magic?

One thing to keep in mind is the enormous overhead that radio transmission eats up. The fact is even with a connection showing 270Mbps (theoretical max of 33.75 MB/s) I can transfer a file to my HD (that tests at 45MB/s with Hdtune) and the best I will see is 15MB/s.

Most people will expect that 30 figure and be seriously dissapointed. With Handshakes and transfer overhead coupled with TCP\IP overhead and then add to that radio overhead.... it is without a doubt better than 100Mb but not by a whole lot.

 

Ah Elrabin.. I see the problem. Mb/s (Mbps) does NOT equal MB/s (MBps). Networks work in mega bits per second; the HDDs work in mega bytes per second.

So, sorry, but networks still easily limit HDDs. Assuming my HDD can sustain a measly 30MB/s, a base 100 network will not handle it all (will do about 12MB/s without network overhead). A full 300 will transfer transfer 37MB/s (again, ignoring overhead).

So yes, there is full reason for a 300 speed wireless. I mean, gigabit networks are great for homes with media centers & lots of network traffic.


Anyway, I looked up the AR5008, and will investigate it a bit more. Thanks!

 

thanks for refreshing my memory...... +1

 

Oops, you're right, 1 megabit = 125Kb, 1 megabyte = 1024Kb.

Chalk it up to me not paying attention due to late AM posting ^_^

so, 300 mbit would be roughly 37.5 MB/s

Compared to roughly 45-70 MB/s for hard disk transfer rates of fast 7200 or 10k RPM drives.

My bad. Network is the bottleneck, not the hard disk.

 

I agree with the AVI's.......then no one debates that a faster HDD will be better.

I guess we have to identify what is your internet use first, and then decide which is the limiting factor. Nevertheless the limiting factor will always (for the moment) be the ISP connection regardless how much you can obtain between the nic and router.

With regards the 300Mbps and the limiting rule you mentioned, I wonder how some people got 300Mbps. Also, I got 144Mbps for more than 1h between my nic and a 2.4GHz router, are you saying that this would be aprox. half of 300Mbps? I thought the 2.4GHz would not deliver 300Mbps.

 

Wireless - many routers advertise 300Mbps possible over 2.4Ghz. Intel of course, disabled this in their ABGN cards, limiting it to only 5Ghz. But assuming you have the right card, you can achieve the full speed.

Anyway, I found this review:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15122

I don't know if my router (a Trednnet TEW-631BRP) has an Atheros, so it looks like I will pass on those cards right now... bummer..

And more research found this for my router:
http://www.newegg.com/product/ProductReview.aspx?item=N82E16833156052

Hmm...

 

Interesting, so you are saying that there is a way to enable 300Mbps in my 4965AGN?

 

wireless--
what router do you have?? I can't remember at the moment////

 

good 7200rpm drives (sammsung F1, or WD 640gb) have max sustained transfer speed of about 120mb/s, average 90mb/s

 

btw, atheros does make the best consmer wi-fi chips. I replaced the wi-fi card in my XPS 1530 with Atheros AR5800E based card.

Also have USB based AR9102E card on the way for family PC, not just need to get a better router.

Already tested on Atheros based router at friends house.

 

does this affect wired? or is this wireless only?

 

Actiontec M124WR, but my router doen't support N, just G, however I did try another router (2.4GHz netgear supporting N) and I got 144Mbps only. I was under the impression that only the 5GHz routers supported 300Mbps.

 

oh, ok.

yes, many the 2.4 GHz N routers can reach 300mbps, but it is almost always w/ the same brand/manufacturers cards. Dlink--DLink, Linksys--Linksys.

At this point in the game they are all still using their own ideas/parts (proprietary) to be compatible w/ the Final N requirements. That won't come out until 2009, so no one is guaranteed diff prod. from diff manufacturers will play properly w/ the others equipment. Hopefully they will all quit playing this game when Final N is out and be compatible through a firmware upgrade...

some use marvel, some use atheros, some use broadcom, etc.

 

I agree, that's why I say is better to keep the router-nic within the same brand, but many time times $/availibility doesn't favor this.

 

doesn't have to be same brand, just same chips/tech.

dlink/apple/toshiba/gigabyte and few more use mostly Atheros based.
linksys mostly use broadcom some ralink, some atheros
buffalo uses some broadcom, some marvell
netgear not excactly sure, but one netgear router i took apart had marvell chips

 

Good information, thanks.

However, is not just a chipset thing, I come from the cell phone industry and many OEM use the same chipset but they implement their products differently to either present a value differential/advantage (marketing) or just their way to do the design to follow their platform strategies. Also, there is their drivers conception, which will meet the "minimum" requiremens of the standard and implement features differently where the standard is not strict about.

Same brands systems will respect the above and ensured a good "system" function.