Do i need to change my nic

britishsligean · July 25, 2014

Within the last month or so i got myself a Dell inspiron 15 5000 series after my trusty HP Pavillion DV6 had a Motherboard failure, that aside I've been having awful trouble with my WiFi, within the last 2 weeks i upgraded my crappy DSL line to a VDSL line and in my bedroom about 50ft away from the router i'm getting around 16-30mb down compared the 86mb next to the router however my up is consistent in both locations at around 19-20mb. Now for one of the things that bugs me, i have an Intel AC-3160 nic, whilst my brother who has a Lenovo E540 with the older Intel N-7260 is getting close to the 90mb we can get over Ethernet, based on a speed test to the same server with both laptops side by side. Signal wise i am fluctuating between 3-5 bars but mostly sitting on 4 or 5 bars. I did an interference test and there is no interference with just signal degradation as you would expect, even doing the same test on a few feet closer to the router in my brothers room the same thing is seen however i have a full 5 bars consistently. I know my nic is a 1x1 and my brothers is a 2x2 surely it shouldn't make as big a difference as it does based on speed tests and i consistently have a speed connection in excess of the speed i am receiving.

Speeds aside i am also having problems with limited connection, about every 24 hours i get a limited internet connection, this is quickly fixed by disconnecting and reconnecting to the router, i am running the latest drivers downloaded from Intel. My brother had a similar issue however in his case it was occurring every 4 hours that was a DNS related issue and was resolved with a DNS flush, when the Microsoft wireless support wizard comes up it says there's no problem to be resolved, is this an issue with my nic or is it 8.1 issue?

Should i look at getting a new nic? if so which one? if it's any help my router is a ZyXel VMG8324-B10A 300mbs on the 2.4Ghz band with no 5Ghz support.

britishsligean · July 30, 2014

I've pretty much discovered that the drop in speed is based on my signal which fluctuates between 135mb/s and 54mb/s and the fact i have a 1x1 so i have decided i need to upgrade the WiFi card to a 2x2 or 3x3, i need recommendations for which cards to look at, i have been looking at the Intel N-7260 or Broadcom BCM943224HMB are there any other recommendations you can suggest? i do not need an AC card, i will be using N300+ for the foreseeable future as it's relativley inexpensive, not really supported on the type of broadband i use and it will not exceed the speed available in area where i live, the fastest is currently 200mb/s but most people are on 100mb/s and i currently get 90mb/s it would be nice if Bluetooth was included but it is not essential. The card needs to be a half mini pcie with 2 ariels