Do i need a wireless card?

VisceralT · Dec 17, 2013

Hi, i am fairly new to pc gaming and i am configuring a desktop through uk gaming computers.com. I am planning on connecting to the internet wirelessly through my BT home hub. Do i need a wireless card to do this?

Sorry if my question was obvious, I'm a newbie when it comes to pc's.

cklaubur · Dec 17, 2013

Depending on the specs of the computer you have built. Some motherboards have wireless built-in, but most require a separate wireless card or adapter.

Casey

dish_moose · Dec 17, 2013

Many gamers do not like/use wireless for gaming - especially First Person Shooters.
-Bruce

Trenchcoat · Dec 17, 2013

dish_moose :

I'll expand on this. Radio waves travel alot slower than near enough the speed of light you'd get by a direct connection to the router.

bill001g · Dec 17, 2013

Trenchcoat :

This is very entertaining but not even close to the reason wireless is not recommended. Technically radio waves do travel a little slower in air than the speed of light but in a vacuum they do travel at the speed of light. The rate in a copper cable since it is not optical also do not travel at the speed of light.

In any case these delays are a tiny speck compared to delays introduced by things like serialization delays going from bits to bytes in the interfaces. Even these are almost nothing. You are talking maybe about 1/10 of a millisecond.

The key reason that wireless is not recommended is interference. Since any damage to the data causes retransmission it causes delays. In this case it is many 10s of not 100s of milliseconds. You can see delays of almost 1/10 of a second for single packet at time. So worrying about the propagation delays due to speed of light is outright silly.

Copper cable is almost immune to interference and unlike wireless any damaged packets which is almost none is dropped rather than retransmitted. A lost packet here or there is tolerated by a game much better than random delays in large numbers of packets.

Trenchcoat · Dec 19, 2013

bill001g :

Trenchcoat :

This is very entertaining but not even close to the reason wireless is not recommended. Technically radio waves do travel a little slower in air than the speed of light but in a vacuum they do travel at the speed of light. The rate in a copper cable since it is not optical also do not travel at the speed of light.

In any case these delays are a tiny speck compared to delays introduced by things like serialization delays going from bits to bytes in the interfaces. Even these are almost nothing. You are talking maybe about 1/10 of a millisecond.

The key reason that wireless is not recommended is interference. Since any damage to the data causes retransmission it causes delays. In this case it is many 10s of not 100s of milliseconds. You can see delays of almost 1/10 of a second for single packet at time. So worrying about the propagation delays due to speed of light is outright silly.

Copper cable is almost immune to interference and unlike wireless any damaged packets which is almost none is dropped rather than retransmitted. A lost packet here or there is tolerated by a game much better than random delays in large numbers of packets.

Not just that. A wireless network should also be secure, which requires encryption which in-turn uses extra resources.

Net result is a system that is slower and can be jammed.

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Do i need a wireless card?

VisceralT

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cklaubur

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dish_moose

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Trenchcoat

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bill001g

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Trenchcoat

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