ASUS Intros the Monstrous PCE-AC88 PCIe Wireless Adapter

[btarunr]

ASUS announced its flagship PCI-Express wireless networking adapter, the PCE-AC88. The card is the first in the market to offer dual-band 4x4 AC3100 Wi-Fi, with speeds of up to 2.1 Gbps at 5 GHz, and 1 Gbps at 2.4 GHz. It takes advantage of 4x4 NitroQAM (1024-QAM) to offer such speeds. A 3x3 adapter would serve 1.3 Gbps. The PCE-AC88 includes a set of four antennae that you can directly attach to the card (ideal for to use the card as a WLAN client), as well as an external, router-looking module for the antennae, letting you use your card (your machine) as a WLAN router, using the included software. The card features a PCI-Express 2.0 x1 bus interface. The company didn't reveal pricing or availability.



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[Deleted member 50521]

ASUS support for their PCI-E based Wireless interface is horrible. It is best to find out what chipset it uses and get the official chipset driver from Microsoft update catalog.

 

[silentbogo]

ASUS support for their PCI-E based Wireless interface is horrible. It is best to find out what chipset it uses and get the official chipset driver from Microsoft update catalog.

MS drivers drop connection and in most cases do not support RX/TX boost. Better download from Mediatek and hope that it works. I'm talking from a personal experience - will never buy ASUS Wireless stuff again.

BTW, last week I've replaced my infamous PCE-N53 with some no-name Ralink-based adapter (bought on PC junkyard for $3) and it worked out of the box in Win10/Ubuntu/FreeBSD while keeping connection @ steady 300Mbit/s.
No connection drops, no random ping increases or lost packets, no headaches. Just lacks the 5GHz band.

 

[cdawall]

Bet it's still slower than a basic Intel 8260

 

[PLAfiller]

I'd prefer TP-Link Archer AC1750 , guess it has better price and probably for my needs will do the same work.

 

[Basard]

Well, a "flagship" NIC.... interesting..... I didn't get past that part of the article, lol...

Ok, I read it.... sound's cool. A flagship NIC though, haha.... I guess you could call it that though.

I think somebody's watching too much Star Trek.... It's probably me, actually.

 

[xvi]

Had my Killer WLAN adapter swapped out for Intel. Stuck with the stupid Killer E2400 dual-NIC onboard, but I'm trying to find a plain Qualcomm driver for it. Do these manufacturer modified/tweaked chips ever work?

 

[Ruru]

And I thought that sound cards are the lamest add-on cards to see a heatsink.

 

[xvi]

And I thought that sound cards are the lamest add-on cards to see a heatsink.

That's actually a fair point. I'd be curious to know just how hot that thing gets.

 

[btarunr]

And I thought that sound cards are the lamest add-on cards to see a heatsink.

Networking hardware, especially WLAN, do tend to get hot. Adapters like these even have their own WPA2 termination (it doesn't make your CPU crunch AES-encrypted data at >2 Gbps back to life).

 

[Tomorrow]

First review: http://www.digitalcitizen.life/reviewing-asus-pce-ac88-wireless-pci-express-network-card-can

No mention of price tho. Im guessing it's ~100$/100€+ considering AC68 was ~70€