In the market for a wireless N router

[AMD_Gamer]

I want to get a wireless N router to use with my new M50VM that has a/b/g/n and the DIR-655 seems to be my best bet with some great reviews and great speed/range, any other models i should look at? I plan to keep my WRT54G with tomato firmware for my iPhone and any other G/B devices i have and run the DIR-655 in N only mode.

I was going to get a dual band router but after doing some research alot of them are still new on the market and have some crummy performance and not alot of good reviews, but the DIR-655 seems like a solid router with great reviews and smallnetbuilder.com recommends to keep your old G router for G devices like i plan to do and hold out until 2009 when N in finalized and dual band comes down in price and has better models.

what does the [H] think?

 

[niccoli]

I've had my DIR-655 now since right after they came out and while some of the early firmware versions had issues I have been pretty happy with the performance on the most recent firmware. I was rather bummed out that they removed the bridging features from the firmware back on the 1.08 firmware. I had been using the DIR-655 as just a wireless AP, upgraded and found that they had just removed the feature and had no indication of it on their release notes. It did give me a good reason to setup the port forwarding rules that I needed and use the DIR-655 for what it was intended so I guess it wasn't all bad but it pissed me off at the time.

 

[GushpinBob]

I would get a dual band router only if I had some devices on a network that utilized 802.11a exclusively. I currently own a DIR-655 and for the past eight months it has served me well. The speed increase is decent but not substantial, however a big advantage that it has over my retired WRT54G is the range. Go for DIR-655; I really recommend it.

 

[AMD_RULES]

I'd suggest the D-Link DIR-655 if you want good coverage and speed, but also do not want to run any third party firmware. If you want to run third party firmware such as DD-WRT or Tomato, I'd suggest the Linksys WRT150N.

 

[Q-BZ]

I would get a dual band router only if I had some devices on a network that utilized 802.11a exclusively. I currently own a DIR-655 and for the past eight months it has served me well. The speed increase is decent but not substantial, however a big advantage that it has over my retired WRT54G is the range. Go for DIR-655; I really recommend it.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30396/100/

The more I think about it and read things like that, the more I'm inclined to save a lot of money and forget dual band and simply get the 655 for myself.

Now here's the question: For a second computer two floors away, what's the best matching adapter to go along with that 655? DWA 130? 140? One of the PCI cards? Something else?

 

[GushpinBob]

What I can tell you is to avoid the DWA-552 (556 also, since it's the same chipset). I've made the mistake of buying this with the DIR-655 assuming that it was the same quality. Wrong.

The card dropped connections all the time (I'm pretty close to the router as well) and since I use WPA on my wireless network I've had to use TKIP because AES would kill the card. What's worse is that my speed dropped back to 54Mb/s whenever using TKIP hence invalidating the primary point of having a draft-n card . Yes, I have used the latest drivers and have tested the card in XP32/XP64/Vista64 and it was absolute rubbish.

Do yourself a favor and pick up a wireless card from Linksys, Netgear, etc. or just use an ethernet to wireless bridge. I'm using one right now (Linksys WGA600N) and it has been running like a champ. D-Link may be making great routers now but man, stay away from their other cards. Especially the DWA series.

 

[Q-BZ]

What I can tell you is to avoid the DWA-552 (556 also, since it's the same chipset). I've made the mistake of buying this with the DIR-655 assuming that it was the same quality. Wrong.

The card dropped connections all the time (I'm pretty close to the router as well) and since I use WPA on my wireless network I've had to use TKIP because AES would kill the card. What's worse is that my speed dropped back to 54Mb/s whenever using TKIP hence invalidating the primary point of having a draft-n card . Yes, I have used the latest drivers and have tested the card in XP32/XP64/Vista64 and it was absolute rubbish.

Do yourself a favor and pick up a wireless card from Linksys, Netgear, etc. or just use an ethernet to wireless bridge. I'm using one right now (Linksys WGA600N) and it has been running like a champ. D-Link may be making great routers now but man, stay away from their other cards. Especially the DWA series.

You're far and away NOT the first person to tell me something like this.

The ethernet-wireless bridge concept is something I've thought about and asked about around here before and people were like "Well, there's nothing to be gained by doing that." I'll bet it's more reliable than what you're talking about, though.

I wonder what I would use as that bridge on the second PC...

Or maybe one of these:

http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=32&FamID=60&ProdID=379

This Hawking HWDN1 is very intruiging...

http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=19&FamID=33&ProdID=377


^^ This is also intruiging, especially since I can upgrade those antennas.

http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=32&FamID=58&ProdID=152

Hmmmm... a 15dbi antenna. That could really take care of any issues!