desktop PCI wireless card?

SupermotoMX · 13 Aug 2010 at 14:31

okay im moving house and a wired connection isnt possible, dont fancy going down the homplug rote either.

i have a belkin N wireless router. i know you guys will complain but the router is fine for me, has been the MOST reliable router i have owned. and can get speeds upto 300mbps

now i use my pc mainly for gaming so im guessing i should get a card which is 300mbps?

only 2 problems, i would like the card itself to be slim, as i have a small mobo with 1 pci expressx1 and 1x pci card free. and inbetween them both is a sapphire HD4730

if i was to get a pci slot one i would be worried of it covering the fan and the card overheating and exploding or something.

looking on ocuk i have found 3 possible ones and was wondering your thoughts

first off this: altho only 150mbps in theory is faster than my 10/100 ethernet on the router

tp-link 150mbps

seccond is the edimax 300mbps

edimax

and lastly the ocuk

ocuk

worried about the OCUK as it seems quite a high card.

what are your thoughts? the pcie x1 is abover the graphics card
and the pci is below it (covering the fan is a possibility)

also would like to stay away from usb as i tend to lose things and internal would look smarter

SupermotoMX · 13 Aug 2010 at 16:05

was also looking at this but thinking its probs way overkill

vsmora · 13 Aug 2010 at 23:19

Nice to hear there are some lucky souls who Belkin haven't disappointed (yet

).

Don't worry about the wifi speed as latency is most important for gaming and even good old 54g can quite happily deal with enough bandwidth and 1ms latency (to your router); 300N won't be noticeably different from 150N. Wifi typically only manages about 20% throughput compared to the signalling rate, while 100Mb wired can easily achieve 75% or better i.e. real-world 60Mb wifi is still slower than 75Mb wired throughput.

Out of the cards you've listed, I'd suggest the OcUK one because the dual antenna cards should give a more reliable connection due to antenna diversity/MIMO. No point going for the expensive Linksys card unless your router supports 5GHz N.

If reception might be a problem then I'd urge you to reconsider a USB dongle. Unlike the antenna on an internal card, a USB dongle is easy to reposition for best signal strength via a cheap extension cable/hub.

SupermotoMX · 14 Aug 2010 at 15:49

well, at the mo i have a little girl, and she likes to climb things, what im most worried about is her trying to stand on the usb stick

and for the wireless cards i have seen upto 9db extensions to the arials for a few £ elsewhere, (not sure why ocuk dosnt stock them?)

this is the router i have, not sure if it has dual band, im thinking it might not

and the ocuk value one im not 100% set on yet, as im worried its going to restrict the air going into the graphics card. starting to learn towards the edimax 300mbps, even if its only slightly faster, its still slightly faster. and looks to be more low profile than the ocuk one