Benchmark Results: 2.4 GHz Transfer Tests
Let’s start with examining our 2 GB single-file transfer tests.
If there were any doubts that up- and down-stream performance are two very different beasts, these first charts should lay such ambiguities to rest.
We see the expected fall-off from the USB adapter as distance and obstructions increased, but we were surprised to see how close Intel and Qualcomm were on download speeds. Given a reasonable margin of error, we’d call them essentially identical. However, Qualcomm shows its mettle on uploads, demonstrating a roughly 200% advantage over the Intel 6300. That said, neither company is able to conquer the ambient RF conditions and sustain an upload from our third location. At best, there would be a few minutes of transfer before the connection cut off.
We ran across two small mysteries here. First, several download tests performed slower in Location 1 than Location 2, which appears backwards. But we confirmed the results in repeated tests. The upload tests in these sets presented results that fell in line with expectations. Second, if you figure about 25 seconds for the Intel or Qualcomm parts to download 200 MB of small files, that’s roughly 8 MB/s. If you figure 3 minutes 40 seconds as a ballpark for the 2 GB download, that’s just over 9 MB/s. Honestly, we expected to see more overhead impact on all of those small file transfers. Either way, hitting in the 60 to 70 Mb/s range for file copying is respectable for integrated Wi-Fi.
Again, we see uploads fail from Location 3, and our USB adapter barely clings to life on these 2.4 GHz distance downloads. Now let’s look at the performance when we switch to 5.0 GHz.
