Wireless Performance – Lab Test – Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300 and ASUS USB-N53

Wireless performance is a whole different animal compared to the wired performance testing.  Unlike most other components you can test on a PC, Wi-Fi connectivity and speeds can be affected by outside factors.  Something as simple as your cordless phone ringing or a neighbor using their microwave to nuke up some popcorn in the middle of your test can cause interference with your wireless connection and skew the results.  I’ve made every effort to minimize any of these outside factors, but there’s always a possibility of something unforeseen occurring.  All Wi-Fi benchmarks, whether here on PcPer or elsewhere, should always be looked at with the understanding that every location offers unique challenges to Wi-Fi connectivity and your mileage may vary.

For our testing, there are multiple configurations that can be tested, and ASUS has supplied us with multiple network cards to test in addition to the Intel Centrino Ultimate N card I’m using as a baseline.  On top of the tests for each card with each router, I also wanted to test both the 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi connections on the routers with the wireless adapters to see if there was any difference using the different frequency ranges.   Since we’re juggling a lot of different tests, I thought the best way to break things up was to first show the results by adapter first and how well they connected to the different router configurations.  Then we’ll flip the data on its head and show the numbers for the routers, listing all the adapter connection speeds.

A word about wireless adapters; you may see some numbers tossed around than an adapter is “3×3”, “2×2” or even “3×3:2”.  A simplistic description is that the first two numbers describe how many Tx (Transmit) and Rx (Receive) streams the card can handle.  The final number lists the number of ‘spatial streams’.  Basically the spatial streams allow wireless signals to be transmitted simultaneously from different antennas on different streams to avoid any conflicts or collisions.

A general rule of thumb for theoretical speeds is:

  • 1×1:1 – 150 Mbps
  • 2×2:1 – 150 – 270 Mbps
  • 2×2:2 – 300 Mbps
  • 3×3:3 – 450 Mbps

Of course, a lot of the ‘theoretical speeds’ are in perfect world situations with matching equipment, and not something most end users will ever see.  If you’re interested, Cisco has a great Youtube video walking through what all the numbers mean that’s well worth a look.

Last, but not least, I wanted to throw in some “Real World Use” tests for USB based adapters that would likely be plugged into a laptop and used in a location other than where the router is.   These tests will give a better idea of what you might see throughout your house and truly test the limit of the routers and adapters as they have to travel a good distance and punch through a bunch of walls and a floors along the way.

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-Fi Adapter (633ANHMW)

First up we’ll baseline our wireless testing with the Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-Fi Adapter (633ANHMW) inside the MSI Laptop.  The Ultimate-N adapter is 3×3:3 and can theoretically get up to 450 Mbps maximum speeds.

The Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 handled the Lab test without much of a hitch.  There was definitely a trend that ping times were slower to the Apple Airport Extreme in comparison to the ASUS RT-N66U in both the 5 and 2.4 Ghz spectrums.  Surprisingly the 2.4 Ghz spectrum faired better than the 5 Ghz spectrum with lower Maximum pingtimes, but if you look at average, you see that the 5 Ghz spectrum faired better.  Across all the tests there was but a single packet lost in over 2000 pings.

Here in download speeds we see the RT-N66U beating out the Apple Airport in both 5 and 2.4 Ghz spectrum speeds.  While the numbers somewhat close in 5 Ghz, in 2.4 Ghz the ASUS router walloped the Airport Extreme with over the double the speeds in all categories.  The ASUS router in particular showed some really great burst and average download speeds at 2.4 Ghz, even beating out the 5 Ghz speeds.

The clear champ across all upload tests is the ASUS RT-N66U running at the 5 Ghz range, beating out the Apple Airport by a clear margin of 12.6%, 13% and 9.4% in Average, Maximum and Minimum upload speeds respectively.   The ASUS router also beat up handily on the Airport Extreme in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum by anywhere from 42 to 58% across the tests.  Another thing to note is the huge bump in speeds when running 5 Ghz vs. 2.4 Ghz with speeds 3 to 4 times as fast.

The testing shows the drastic difference you can get by moving your Wi-Fi network up to the 5 Ghz range as opposed to the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum.  At 2.4 GHz, the RT-N66U was almost 44.8% slower in average upload and 52.3% slower in maximum upload speed than the Apple Airport Extreme.  Moving to the 5 GHz Wi-Fi range on the ASUS router saw it lead the pack and jump ahead of Apple by 13.2% average upload speed and 5.4% on maximum upload speed.

ASUS USB-N53 Dual-Band Wireless-N Adapter

The ASUS USB-N53 Dual-Band Wireless-N Adapter is a member of ASUS’ Dual-Band N Series of adapters.  This 2×2:2 802.11 a/b/g/n adapter can plug into any USB 2.0 interface and using anywhere between 2.4 to 5.8 GHz range claims to gets speeds of up to 300 Mbps.

Manufacturers can often tweak the hardware and drivers to get a bit more speed out of a connection if both the adapter and router in use are from them.  If the USB-N53 can match the 300 Mbps claims, it would beat out the fastest Wi-Fi speeds we’ve seen so far.

        

The box comes with the USB adapter itself, an adjustable USB extension cable, documentation and a driver CD.  The design of the adapter is nice, seemingly sturdy enough to stand up to normal use and has the stylish black cross hatch design on the top surface to match the RT-N66U router.

    

The included software installs the drivers and gives you the option either use Windows to manage your Wi-Fi networks, or use the ASUS WLAN Control Center to do it.  The ASUS WLAN Control Center, like the router firmware UI, is nice and clean, making setup of the adapter easy.

Now that we have an ASUS adapter in the mix with the ASUS router, we can play with the WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) button on the router.  With a simple touch of the WPS button on the back of the router you can avoid having to input big strings of SSID’s, WEP/WPA/WPA2 settings and keys and it will do everything for you.

30 seconds and a few screens later, you’re setup and ready to go.  Now let’s see if the connectivity and speeds of the ASUS USB-N53 are as good as the ease of setup.

Ping tests show nothing out of the ordinary.  Once again we see some spikes in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum that might be caused by some interference, but average speeds are fine.

While at 5 Ghz the ASUS RT-N66U clobbers the Apple Airport in downloads by anywhere from 30-40%, we finally see the Apple Airport pull ahead in a single test at 2.4 Ghz.  The Apple Airport had a burst speed download of 90.3 Mbps where the RT-N66U clocked in at 80.2 Mbps.  The 11% jump is nice, but it doesn’t last long as the RT-N66U beats the Airport in all the other tests.

The ASUS RT-N66U beats out the Apple Airport Extreme in each category of Upload speeds.  At 5 Ghz we see the peak upload speed between the USB-N53 and the RT-N66U router at 5 Ghz reach 153.3 Mbps.   While it still falls short of the 300 Mbps theoretical speeds, it’s still a hefty 21.7% faster than the Airport Extreme at 5 Ghz.  Average and Minimum speeds are about 10% faster on the ASUS Router at 5 Ghz.

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