Asus PCE AC-88
Finally 4x4 for the desktop
PRICE $ 169 asus.com.au
There
are a lot of router manufacturers out there making some rather bold claims about performance. In reality the vast majority don’t perform anywhere close to those speeds, but it’s not their fault. They use a 4x4 transmit/receive antennae system, whereas most devices are limited to 2x2, so you’ll theoretically only get half the speed.
Thankfully we’re slowly starting to see more 4x4 devices arrive on the market, such as this PCIe card from Asus, designed to turn your desktop PC into a Wi-Fi powered beast.
This is a rather intimidating card to look at, with a huge red heatsink residing atop the network chip, and with four cable connections coming out of the rear output of the card. These then connect to an antennae base that has four moveable antennae. You don’t have to use the antennae base and cables though – you can also screw each antennae directly into the rear of the card.
It’s not the sexiest of solutions, adding another four cables or antennae to the rear of your PC, but it does the job well enough. The antennae base features a magnet to stick to the top of your case, so it doesn’t topple if you have the antennae sticking out at weird angles.
One unique feature of this card is the support for 1024-QAMD over both 802.11n and 802.11ac, which basically squeezes more bits into each signal. This delivers a theoretical maximum of 2167Mbit/sec over 802.11ac and 1000Mbit/s over 802.11n. Hence the AC3100 naming of this product, which combines both networks to show the overall theoretical top speed if it’s maxed out, a common naming standard when it comes to Wi-Fi products.
Asus claims this card also supports MU-MIMO technology, but as our test router still doesn’t support this feature, we were unable to verify this for ourselves (despite the test router having MU-MIMO as part of the product name – go figure).
As expected, in terms of performance, this thing blows other network products out of the water – and then right into low Earth orbit. When testing with 802.11ac, at a range of five metres we measured a blistering read speed of 876Mbitd/sec – that’s almost Gigabit Ethernet speeds, the first device we’ve tested to some so close. At ten metres the numbers dropped off, obviously, down to 643Mbit/sec, but that’s still
4x4 devices, such as this PCIe card from Asus, are designed to turn your desktop PC into a Wi-Fi powered beast
some seriously impressive performance for Wi-Fi. 802.11N performance was also excellent, hitting 208Mbit/ sec at a range of ten metres – more than enough for serious gaming and streaming HD movies.
We’re finally starting to see network devices catch up to the technology that has been packed into routers over the last year or so, and the PCE-AC88 is a fine example. It’s significantly more expensive than other PCIe Wi-Fi cards, but the huge boost in performance more than makes up for the extra expense. BENNETT RING