I suppose money has something to do with it but wifi cards are such a commodity now its frustrating to see them do this with a relatively low margin product.
From the little I found about the different ralink chipsets, the RT2800 seems to feature a reflashable N standard so I took that to mean that newer N standards will be available as firmware flashes. The RF and BB/MAC chips are also different and at least 3 years newer than the popular RT2501. Its definately a much more up to date and powerful chipset from the specification (even in raw transmitting and processing power). There's a lot more I don't know about it than what I do know, but ralink seems to be pretty involved with the wifi certification body so that, in conjunction with their jump in quality in recent years, and the fact that the card is only a few bucks more expensive, is enough for me to take the plunge on one of the lesser proven RT2800 cards. They're also about a year old now with good driver support. I am just making an educated guess that this chipset further takes the load off the CPU as compared to the RT2501. There is a PDF floating around where Ralink states the improved hardware acceleration of the RT2800, which I would usually take with a grain of salt but since i am comparing it to one of their own previous chipsets, I think it ties in nicely with my original question regarding CPU utilization
I'm no networking expert but I think I have enough info now for my purchase at least. As a matter of curiosity though it would be cool if anyone still has more info on different wifi chipsets. I'm mostly still interested in the featureset of competing Atheros products and also where Intel's notebook platform adapters stand in comparison.
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