Getting a new Wireless Adapter... help me decide!

TheJamsh

TheJamsh

TheJamsh

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Joined
17 Feb 2012
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127
Recently my TP-LINK Wireless adapter has been giving me BSOD troubles (google "athurx.sys bluescreen" for many hits on this problem), and even after some tedious driver updates and rollbacks I'm still getting the problem. The TP-Link isn't very powerful either, and often has conflicts if it shares the same USB connection to the motherboard as other hardware, often knocking out the connection entirely.

I'm not really prepared to sacrifice an otherwise stable system during a reformat just to potentially fix my issue. It was fine until I Installed Kaspersky IS 2013, but that's far too deep of a hole for me to climb into.

I've been doing some research and it seems PCI Wireless cards are a much more powerful and stable option. I've got plenty of PCI space, so are there any you guys would recommend? Anything BUT TP-Link :)

My budget isn't high, I don't really want to get one at all but not having yet another cable hanging out the back of my build is all too tempting.
 
You say anything but TP-Link? OK, here's a TP-Link card ;)

I use the TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 N900 Wireless Dual Band PCI Express Adapter with my Hackintosh and it's been absolutely rock solid. I run it at 5GHz/450Mb/s.
 
The brand isn't really important. It's the chipset the card uses. In my experience, the best cards for Windows and Linux use the Atheros chipsets. Particularly for Linux, Atheros are second to none with a great relationship with the FOSS community, providing great code and drivers.

The wireless card philip mentioned uses an Atheros chip, but bare in mind it's PCIe, not PCI. Another thing to bare in mind is that controller manufacturers can switch chips when they revise products. Netgear did this with the WG311. Revision 1 used Atheros, 2 used Texas Instruments and 3 used Marvell. I made the mistake of buying a WG311 years ago without checking the revision and ended up with revision 3 which was an absolute ball ache at the time trying to get it to work on Linux. So I bought a D-Link DWA-547 instead and it was supported OOB by the kernel since it used an Atheros chipset. Also, I bought a second DWA-547 that was a second or third revision which uses a later chip (AR9xxx series compared to the first revision AR5xxx series) that you had to build against the kernel or it continually dropped connection, but once it was built it worked fine. In later kernels it was supported OOB as well.
 
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