USB Wireless Adaptors?

[SEE]

If anyone has any experience of these USB wireless adapters for on line simming I would appreciate their feedback. My PC is currently hardwired to my Broadband router (which supports wireless and wired) and would like to go 'wireless' but have seen various articles that say 'lag' is a problem when using them for gaming. There also appears to be N150 and N300 types available but was told by my local computer store that a N150 (150Mb/s) is fine for on line gaming. Any feedback or advice would be really useful, thanks!

[Robotic Pope]

What type of wireless does your router support? There is little point in getting an 150N or 300N usb adapter if your current router only supports a 54G wireless network. The N150/300 adapter would be limited to 54 mb/s. So unless you planed to upgrade your router in the near future, the extra cost of an 150/300N would be wasted.

My wireless network is an older 54G one and ive been very happy with it. For our kind of internet speeds (mines 20mb) you arn't going to see lag over such short distance from your router. It would be different if you had a 50mb internet connection or higher or you wanted to play over a 100mb LAN, then you would have a bottleneck.

So yeah, if your router can do 150N, get that. If it can't, then 54G should be fine too.

[GHarris]

No harm in getting a wireless-n card if it doesn't cost much extra, but for gaming it won't make a difference over an "old fashioned" wireless-g (54mbps) adapter. It would only help when transferring large files across the wireless network and that kind of thing. Personally I've found that wireless-n doesn't help with the maximum range of a wireless connection.

(Apologies if any of this is stuff you already know...)

I have in the past used a 54mbps USB wireless stick for gaming and it worked flawlessly. But there can be snags. When gaming what matters is response time. Not how much data can be sent per second (your wireless connection will undoubtedly have more bandwidth than your internet connection, and your internet connection is likely to have more bandwidth than the game requires) but how long it takes for a single packet of data to be sent from your PC to the server hosting the game. When you're using a wired network connection from your PC to your router, a data packet's journey from your PC to your router will take less than a millisecond. Good, responsive pings between your router and the server running the game are in the range of tens of milliseconds, so a wired connection effectively adds no lag. With wireless networking there are a couple of ways in which they can add, a lot, to lag, adding tens or hundreds of milliseconds to your ping.

- The wireless connection's signal strength needs to be as good as you can reasonably make it. Four bars out of 5 (according to the Windows wireless connection properties page), also called "very good" should be fine, and should give you pings of about 1 millisecond. 3 bars/"good" might also be OK. Below that, an increasingly large proportion of data packets get dropped so (I might be wrong on the detail here) they have to be re-sent and there's a delay.

- Windows can have an annoying tendency to stop for a second, perhaps once every minute or two, and look for other wireless connections in the area that you might want to connect to. When gaming on a desktop PC this is completely unnecessary - you are connected to the wireless network you want and you're trying to get on with using it, thanks very much! The result of this scanning for other wireless networks is that you get large hitches in your ping - ping spikes, lag spikes, whatever you want to call it - of the order of over a second of delay. This is extremely annoying in online gaming, to say the least. There are ways to disable this periodic search for other wireless networks, but the way to do it depends on your version of Windows. Google "wireless ping spike" to find discussions on the topic.

[SEE]

Many thanks chaps, all my questions answered! :grin:

[swiss]

Dont go for MSI usb wlan sticks, hat had two, both failed after about 30days(probably due to overheating).

[SEE]

Bought a Belkin and tried it on HL .....seems fine so far and the 'Ping' seemed pretty much what I had with hard wire. Once again, Many thanks guys.............