Best Wireless Pair

[cnjmorris]

I have a ASUS RT-N66 showing up Friday and I am wondering if I would benefit from upgrading the Atheros AR5B97 in my laptop via a USB dongle.

My current connection clearly won't take advantage of the dual band router but I'm curious if it is worth the investment and how much improvement I can reasonably see.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833162060 for example claims up to 450mbps for $34 but is not dual band.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833315117 also claims up to 450mbps for $49 and is dual band.

Some input would be appreciated.

 

[kevnich2]

I doubt you'd see much if any improvement to be honest and you'd lose convenience of a built in wifi card. I'd stick with the atheros card you already have.

 

[JackMDS]

Do a search, depending on the laptop you probably can find a Dual band Wireless card for your laptop on ebay for under $20.

In many laptops it is an easy 20min. job to change the Wireless card.

Example - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Atheros-AR5...US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item20c0507bf9

Ans another one - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Broadcom-ha...958?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1e6981dfa6

In many cases switching from a regular N to Dual band N provides significant improvement in the bandwidth.