Decent inexpensive dual band PCIe 802.11AC adapter

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runt

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I'm looking for a dual band PCIe 802.11AC adapter that won't break the bank. I had purchased an Edimax EW-7822UAC and they seem to be hit or miss as to if they will work or not. Mine didn't and I'd rather have internal anyway.
 
I've had very good luck with the intel 7260 cards in the past, and recently a gigabyte GC-WB11ACD-I that worked flawlessly.
 
sample size is miniscule but I bought 4 of the smaller edimax 1200's they all worked.
 
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So there are two types of slots, the old PCIe Half mini card, and the new M.2 slot. After looking this over both of the options I posted below have the new M.2 slot on them.

https://communities.intel.com/thread/60858

At the upper end of the cost spectrum, you can get options like this gigabyte or ASUS which are glorified PCI-E pass throughs which can house the laptop wifi cards. These are probably the best bet as you might be able to pick up a newer wifi chip in the future, and just swap it out.

$50 and uses an Intel wifi chipset
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GC-...&qid=1517597636&sr=8-6&keywords=pci-e+wifi+ac

$35 and uses a realtek wifi chipset like the edimax does
https://www.amazon.com/PCE-AC55BT-B...&qid=1517597636&sr=8-5&keywords=pci-e+wifi+ac


I'd probably spring for the gigabyte one, as the reviews mention no driver issues and it should be quite common. Looking at both of them up closer they both are in fact using the 2 notch style cards, so I'm 99% sure that's the new M.2 form factor. So when whatever new fancy thing comes out, just grab a newer chip off ebay and put it into your card. (You just want to make sure it's the 2 notch rectangle and not the old single notch square. Most likely all new cards will be 2 notch anyway) If you get something with extra antennas, it would be trivial to mod that card to accept them. Those little RP-SMA connectors can be bought all over the place or just taken off of something else like an old WRT54G you probably have lying around, so if you wanted to go 3 or even 4 antenna if the chip you bought has that many ports on it, you definitely can.


For reference both of these cards also have a Bluetooth module onboard, but those have to go through USB since the cards are just PCI-e passthough. That requires using a USB header or coming up with another way to hook it to USB if you did want that option. You don't have to hook it up though, and you just wouldn't have BT if you didn't bother with it.
 
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bman212121 said:
So there are two types of slots, the old PCIe Half mini card, and the new M.2 slot. After looking this over both of the options I posted below have the new M.2 slot on them.

https://communities.intel.com/thread/60858

At the upper end of the cost spectrum, you can get options like this gigabyte or ASUS which are glorified PCI-E pass throughs which can house the laptop wifi cards. These are probably the best bet as you might be able to pick up a newer wifi chip in the future, and just swap it out.

$50 and uses an Intel wifi chipset
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GC-...&qid=1517597636&sr=8-6&keywords=pci-e+wifi+ac

$35 and uses a realtek wifi chipset like the edimax does
https://www.amazon.com/PCE-AC55BT-B...&qid=1517597636&sr=8-5&keywords=pci-e+wifi+ac


I'd probably spring for the gigabyte one, as the reviews mention no driver issues and it should be quite common. Looking at both of them up closer they both are in fact using the 2 notch style cards, so I'm 99% sure that's the new M.2 form factor. So when whatever new fancy thing comes out, just grab a newer chip off ebay and put it into your card. (You just want to make sure it's the 2 notch rectangle and not the old single notch square. Most likely all new cards will be 2 notch anyway) If you get something with extra antennas, it would be trivial to mod that card to accept them. Those little RP-SMA connectors can be bought all over the place or just taken off of something else like an old WRT54G you probably have lying around, so if you wanted to go 3 or even 4 antenna if the chip you bought has that many ports on it, you definitely can.


For reference both of these cards also have a Bluetooth module onboard, but those have to go through USB since the cards are just PCI-e passthough. That requires using a USB header or coming up with another way to hook it to USB if you did want that option. You don't have to hook it up though, and you just wouldn't have BT if you didn't bother with it.
Click to expand...

I'll probably go with the GIgabyte one, since it works with Linux as well.
 
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cageman said:
Would that be good for gaming as well? Cannot really have a wired connection for now.
Click to expand...
I hope so. I’ll use it for the same thing unless I get mad enough to run a CAT5e a way I don’t really want to
 
As long as both ends of the connection are okay, it's going to be decent. Wifi used to add 6 - 7 or even as much as 14ms to pings back in the B / G days. Now days wifi is quite stable, so gaming isn't nearly as big of a deal as it used to be. The main thing is if you want to game, keep as much traffic off of your connection as possible as wifi is still half duplex and shared. I just did a ping test for 2 minutes straight and I consistently get 1ms pings between my AP and my laptop, but there is an occasional hiccup because someone else is using the wifi. So 95% of the time it's 1ms, but I see an occasional ping > 100ms. Whether or not you'll see that in game is hard to say, but I know it's definitely nothing like it used to be. IIRC when my friend used to have delayed packets sometimes it was greater than 1 second, and they would glitch around the screen.
 
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