Posted by bmes_ @ 11:03 CST, 12 February 2012 - iMsg
I need to occasionally start using wireless connection and would like something that runs so well I can play quakelive as smooth as i can on it..... can anyone give a recommendation?
Any modern card will do you fine (you only need wireless n if your router supports it and you have a fast connection-although much less than the fabled 54 MBS!), hardware level stuff isn't going to do anything other than rape your wallet.
Just pick an ISP with good routing and local server. Look into a good config too.
Even pros on LANS get ping/connection issues with quakelive.
google killer nic if you have money to burn. Just rememebr 2-3 ping is not going to make an difference.
Routing/packet loss is far bigger issue and beyond your control.
Yeah your right, I'm just worried that I'll buy some random wireless adapter, and find out my signal strength is shit and I can't play on it, do you think a USB adapter would perform worse than a PCI E one? Hmm.
Well try the signal strength with a laptop first, PCI would be better than USB, but it might be worse becuase its behind your PC, try the plug adaptors, they can plug into the electric circuits at your home, then you can have ethernet reliability with the practacalities of wireless. But any random wireless adaptor will do.
if you have bad signal, try a repeater, or goa via the plugs socket.
I don't like wireless connections for many reasons.
don't listen to jamerio. obviously, you don't need 802.11n support if your network isn't 802.11n, but it might be better for upgradeability. that said, I'm not sure dual-band NICs are a good idea. you ideally want a card with an external dipole antenna, which makes PCI cards generally preferable--not really for the power profile, but rather their fixed nature. to ideally receive a signal within a certain band, the antenna needs to be the radius of the wavelength or some harmonic thereof, so if you are looking for the best card specific to your network with intents on having the best signal, it would be better overall to have a card for the band you're currently using.
the important thing to look at on card specs is received sensitivity. this is a measure of how high the noise floor can be before the card will error out. I am not sure how consistently these statistics are reported. most crappy cards won't list these specs at all, so that makes it somewhat easier, but it's not a guarantee that some won't misrepresent their capabilities. look to reviews for this, and the general axiom: you get what you pay for.
just because jamerio is trolling, I have to say that I don't know what "54 MBS" means. it's 54Mbps, but I guess the point he's trying to make is that you don't actually get 54Mbps throughput over an 802.11g signal. this is true. I don't know what "hardware level stuff isn't going to do anything" means at all, though. if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say he's talking about header and checksum offloading, but I doubt he even really knows what those are, so I'm unsure if that's likely. with that said, this is a large part of what things like KillerNIC do, and they are absolutely not worth anyone's money.