Best USB 802.11n Stick

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nocona_xeon

Honorable
Dec 11, 2012
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The 802.11g laptop OBD NIC transceiver seems to be starting to go bad.

In any case, moving to an 802.11n USB 2.0 NIC would match my router's best wireless speed and hopefully transceive better.

Of concern is: do the super small USB NIC's where only 1/4" sticks out from the port support all of the hardware offloading and encryption functions on chip OR do those kind tax the CPU? I have seen some super tiny ones by unknown brand names (and I do know a lot) and I would rather pay a premium for quality than junk.

The router is a Cisco/Linksys E3200 (but likely to be replaced soon with a better one).

Thank you for any and all recommendations for a USB NIC capable of: transceive quality, reliability, processing of checksums, processing of encryptions, etc.

I do realize that the USB 2.0 port may be a speed bottleneck but I really do need to get something of better quality and I could also then turn off the router's wireless a/b/g and only accept "n" connections. Lastly, I could even connect it to a desktop PC with a USB 3.0 port if I ever needed to do that.
 
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usb2 is unlikely to bottleneck your wireless. Even the very newest 802.11ac nics do not get anywhere close to the magic sales numbers they quote. A 802.11n nic will be lucky to get 100m. usb2 is speced to run up to 450m.

Those tiny little wireless cards should be avoided. The problem is not related to the chips in the device they all can pretty much run the wireless fine. The problem is the antenna are extremely small and placing them almost inside the computer blocks even more of the signal.

The best usb adapters tend to be ones that you connect on the end of USB extension cable and have external removable antenna. Even without external antenna it helps a lot to be able to place the radio device in a slightly different...
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bill001g

Titan
Aug 9, 2012
28,318
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usb2 is unlikely to bottleneck your wireless. Even the very newest 802.11ac nics do not get anywhere close to the magic sales numbers they quote. A 802.11n nic will be lucky to get 100m. usb2 is speced to run up to 450m.

Those tiny little wireless cards should be avoided. The problem is not related to the chips in the device they all can pretty much run the wireless fine. The problem is the antenna are extremely small and placing them almost inside the computer blocks even more of the signal.

The best usb adapters tend to be ones that you connect on the end of USB extension cable and have external removable antenna. Even without external antenna it helps a lot to be able to place the radio device in a slightly different location when the place you want to sit does not have the best wireless coverage.

With a laptop you may want to see if you can remove and replace the internal card. Most these small cards use a standard interface and can be upgraded. If your concern is the size of USB device a internal wireless card can use the large antennas that are normally behind the screen on a laptop.
 
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