wifi Performance Differences between PCI-e Wifi Cards vs USB Wifi Adapters?

[nathanyule]

Does anyone know the performance differences between a usb wifi adapter and a PCI-e wifi card? I can't use ethernet unfortunately. 

[Stahlmann]

As long as everything else is the same, there should not be a difference. No WIFI signal will need more bandwidth than USB 3.0 has to offer.

[Electronics Wizardy]

whats your target speed? What router do you have?

 

Normally pcie wifi apaters can run at higher speed.

[Parideboy]

Virtually none. In my experience, usb adapters disconnected when getting too hot. To fix this, I had to unplug and plug back in the adapter.

This happened with 3 different adapters of 3 different brands.

[CWALD]

If your internet or network speed is slow you won't see much difference but PCIe cards have varieties available for higher speeds and are generally more reliable. USB 3.0 might compensate for this but then its taking up a usb 3.0 slot

[Moonzy]

i've used 3 USB wifi cards

two of them would drop connections at regular interval under sustained load (above 20mbps i noticed) (i suspect they overheated?)

the other 1 just died

 

for normal browsing use, it's fine

as long as no sustained high load

[nathanyule]

I have a 175 mb speed. Also, in what scenario would the USB adapters overheat?

[Parideboy]

11 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

i've used 3 USB wifi cards

two of them would drop connections at regular interval under sustained load (above 20mbps i noticed) (i suspect they overheated?)

the other 1 just died

 

for normal browsing use, it's fine

as long as no sustained high load

Usually I was downloading stuff when it happened to me. Either http or p2p, it didn't matter. I had a pretty shitty connection (20Mbps, realisticly around 15/16) and I used to leave the pc turned on overnight to finish the downloads only to find out the adapter disconnected. I had to limit the download speed to "solve" this issue.

 

9 minutes ago, nathanyule said:

I have a 175 mb speed. Also, in what scenario would the USB adapters overheat?

Downloading/Uploading for at least 30 minutes/1 hour straight.

Under a 'normal' use, they're fine.

 

If your only option is wifi, you might consider a powerline as an alternative

[sub68]

a pcie card is so reliable my wifi card could not even support firefox with zoom on it would just crash zoom

and the usb card would just crash and disconnect so I would get a pcie card

[nathanyule]

On 8/19/2020 at 8:18 AM, Parideboy said:

If your only option is wifi, you might consider a powerline as an alternative

Used the powerline alternative today, much better speeds than my PCIe wifi card. The reason I needed to replace the PCIe wifi card was that I just got a 1070 and it would block both the lanes, so this alternative worked out great. Thanks for the info!

[Donut417]

On 8/19/2020 at 11:02 AM, nathanyule said:

Does anyone know the performance differences between a usb wifi adapter and a PCI-e wifi card? I can't use ethernet unfortunately. 

USB adapters have a issue with over heating. Also some of them have tiny antennas which means they won't always pick up the WiFi signal the best.