ASUS PCE-AC66 Dual-Band 802.11 AC PCIe Wireless Card Review

[Apoptosis]

The ASUS PCE-AC66 is a 802.11ac Wi-Fi PCI Express adapter for desktop that allows you to to ditch the Ethernet cords and experience 802.11ac wireless speeds of up to 1.3Gbps through the 5GHz band. This is made possible because the ASUS PCE-AC66 uses Broadcom’s new 5th generation Wi-Fi 802.11ac chipset. Read on to see how it performs!

The ASUS PCE-AC66 Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Adapter runs $93.99 shipped and is the only 3x3 (1300Mbps) draft 802.11ac network adapter card available on the market today. If you want to place a desktop computer in a remote part of a house or can't run a hardwired network connection due to how difficult it would be, this is the solution for you...

Article Title: ASUS PCE-AC66 Dual-Band 802.11 AC PCIe Wireless Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2189/1/

[Major_A]

The ASUS RT-AC66U router runs $192.99 shipped, so you are looking at about $287 to move over to an 802.11AC setup.

The first WiFi stuff I bought many years ago was a Microsoft branded Wireless B router and Wireless B adapter. I think the entire setup was close to $300 at the time (still have the adapter somewhere). I have an ASUS Wireless N PCIe card and it's just meh. The reason I went with it was to get away from USB 2.0 to a more robust PCIe slot. Trouble is there must be too much EMI on the back of the case because the adapter gets pretty dismal connection strength.

So when is Broadcomm/Intel/whoever going to come out with a consumer grade 10Gb chipset that doesn't cost $350 for the NIC alone?

[Apoptosis]

So when is Broadcomm/Intel/whoever going to come out with a consumer grade 10Gb chipset that doesn't cost $350 for the NIC alone?

Hopefully Intel will have one by the end of the year or early 2014. Other brands will be out very soon Think in time for all the Haswell mobile solutions where there needs to be an 802.11ac wifi module.

[Major_A]

That's good to know since WiFi is catching up to a wired connection (I'd still prefer a wired connection). I have a Wireless N 450 adapter but once I put a load on it the signal drops to about 150Mbps. I hammer my wired Gb NIC and it doesn't care.

[Kaos Kid]

I've never seen such a big heatsink on a PCI-e card before (that wasn't a graphics card)