Intel Wifi Link 5100 vs. 5300; Range or Speed? (More Antennas)

I am getting the new Dell E4300.

Is has the option for the Intel LInk 5300 which has 3x3 Antennas as opposed to 1x2 the 5100 has.

Does the 5300 offer better range / reliability or merely more speed?
At least in near future I will probably only us B or G, not N.

Thanks for the info

 

I've heard the 5100 kind of sucks. Get the 5300.

 

Get an atheros one, they are a ton times better.

 

intel 5100 worst wirless card ever,
u dont expect product of such poor quality from intel,
look at my sig, i had hp dv7t and now gateway p7811, both has 5100 in it,
drops signal constantly.

get dell wirless N card.

 

If it helps, I'm using an Intel Wifi Link 5100 only for a week though. I don't know if it's gonna give out on me later, but it's been working well with my Wireless N linksys router. I get 65 Mbps.

 

i got 5100 card in my hp, and i updated the drivers for it on the intel site and i now have wireless N and better reception than my step dads sony. dunno what hes got though.

 

I have the 5300 in my Lenovo x200, getting speeds of 144 Mbps on wireless N. It hasn't dropped out on me yet.

 

I upgraded to a 5300. It is fast but I never gave the 5100 a chance, so I have nothing to compare it to.

 

All depends on your wireless router, have an Apple Time Capsule Transmitting 5GHZ N only an Intel 4965AGN in my sony TZ and it's connected via the 5GHZ N band at 300mbps, the 2.4ghz N only does 144mbps, anyway i'm getting 5-7MB/s Read/Write speed over 5GHZ N, pretty Impressive, 54mbps G gives only 2-3MB/s, bottle neck is the Hard Drive in Time Capsule which has a crappy SATA-Ethernet bridger chip which max's out at 15Mb/s...

If I had a better NAS i.e one that does 25MB/s and the wifi link 5300 who knows what speeds I would get...

 

I have the 5100 card in my Thinkpad x200, and have experienced no problems with it. Range is good, signal is stable, and speed seems good as well(although I have only been able to test with B and G, I don't have a wireless N Router [Yet]). The 5300 might be better in theory, although I have yet to see a single side by side comparison of the two products in real world usage.

 

I have the 5100 for over a week and have had 0 problems, i must have downloaded 1000mb or more, but i dont have a draft n router!

Regards

John.

 

If its only a bit more get the 5300 its the king of the hill, the 5100 is in some ways not even as good as the older 4965, less power use is about the only benifit.

Im actually thinking of putting a 5300 in my Asus EEE netbook

I have the 5100 in my G50V and its a fine card tho, I get full signal and full transfer speed, but just like John I only have a G router/AP not a "N" one.

When I do make the leap it will be to a nice dual band N router thats not a piece of trash, and probably when its out of draft.

I really do not like Dlink or Linksys anymore these days, Buffalo has by far been better at performance, and also I like its configuration software/firmware better too.

 

Less power use is what I was hoping from the 5100, though I haven't found anything confirming this. Have you seen any information about power draw of the 5100 vs 5300?

I expect power consumption to be higher while moving a block of data, but with correspondingly higher transfer rate that probably evens out (bits per watt? ). What I'm interested in is whether the 5100 might be lower power on average during low-traffic or idle.

 

5100 & 5300 should be identical, the 5300 uses one more antenna connection and thats the only thing I can think will make it different but it probably only uses that antenna when your on dual band N connections, since it can move data faster, it will be in use less and thus will use less power so its probably still about the same.

I mean the 5000 series in general is better than the older 4000 series so the 5300 & 5100 should use less power than the 4965.

 

I have a sony z with the 5100 card and a thinkpad t61 with the older 4965agn card.

The 4965 card is much better. Its faster (300mbps vs 150mbps connection), more stable (doesn't drop connections at all vs the 5100 which drops all the time), and gets better range.

Very disapointed with the 5100. I'm hoping its just immature drivers, but the newest drivers that came out 10/8 didn't fix any of my issues.

 

May just be a bad connection on the card. My 5100 gets the same speed & signal as my 4965.

Not sure what the max bitrate is on it with a N connection tho, my networks are G

 

Does the 4965 do 40mhz with wireless N 2.4ghz? It's a shame that the 5300 that I have was all hyped up to be the card to get, but in the end, it'll only do 20mhz on wireless N 2.4ghz so it'll only connect at up to 130mbps.

 

Not correct it works up to 450mb/s on the intel spec sheet ( http://download.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/wireless/319982.pdf) and I have had somebody personally vouch that it works on another forum, he had to manually set his router for dual band and then set his drivers up also.

It may not be all "plug & play" and as with anything in technology often updating one piece of equipment requires another new piece of equipment to synergize with it. This is why I am in no hurry for N until its finalized forget this draft business.

The router used in this case above was one of those linksys extreme N routers.

Quoted from intel page:

I bolded the part that would apply to you.

 

The 5300 will need a 3-antenna 802.11n wireless router in order to get 450mbps.

Does anyone know a router that can get 450? Someone suggested the D-link xtreme-n models, but all of those that I have seen only hit 300.

 

mine does up to 144MB/s via single channel N mode on DLink 625 router.

after I upgraded the firmware on the router, the connection went flawless. Before it used to give me slight delay from the time I opened a page over the internet to the time it loaded it, about 1-2 sec. Now it goes flat speed, like on wire This is on secure WPA2 connection.

 

Try to change the number of radio channel in the Dlink router preferences.

 

Read this thread for configuration tips and detailed benchmarks of the 5100. Also if you have a 5300, please post your numbers there (I have yet to see any true comparison that shows the 5300 is better).

 

im not sure about speed, but i get noticeably better range on my 5300 than my colleagues 5100

(im using a precision he's using a latitude)

 

I have a 5100 in my laptop with 2 built-in antennas. Can I upgrade to 5300? Will it work fine with 2 antennas? Any benefits of this upgrade?

Thanks a lot!

-

 

Connection dropping can cause by many other factors, and if both laptops are getting the same problem, then I think the curlpit is the router. You may want to try changing some settings on the router or updating the firmware.

Hey miro, is yours a 5100 or 5300?

 

I just replaced my Intel 5100 with a 5300, adding a third antenna as necessary. Honestly, I can't tell the difference so far. The main reason behind the upgrade was hope that my wireless reception would improve on my University campus but that is clearly not the case - I'm still having the same issues in the same spots.

 

Hello,

I have a Vaio Z540 CTO with the Intel 5100 a/b/g/n wireless half-mini card and use a 4 year old Linksys WRT54GS "G" router with Speedbooster technology and can confirm that I get consistent 410+ KB/S downloads from decent websites and 230-400 KB/S downloads from your garden brand variety sites. There's a few Screenshots posted below.

I also updated my driver straight from the Intel website to version 12.2.0.11 and installed it directly over top of the existing 12.0.0.73 version (using the Intel iProDifX.exe installer after extracting all files from the .zip folder) in order to preserve any other modifications that Sony may have made and included with the original Intel ProSet driver package provided on their website. The result is a strong, rock solid connection in the sense that the hardware light turns on instantly now when opening the lid from a "sleep" state as well from a fresh start. Also, the adapter can be turned off and on with SmartWi or enabled and disabled with a snappiness that didn't exist before. I don't know how else to describe it other than you can just 'feel' the improvement.

I forget what site it was, but one time my download hit over 500 KB/S, so I'm sure that the general speed of downloads would only increase with an official 'N' router. I hope that clears up some thoughts on the 5100 but the 5300 might be a great card for heavy multitasking. I haven't heard any mention whether or not the Vaio Z's have the extra antenna connection already wired in and taped off near the slot should someone like to upgrade to the 5300 but I have seen other laptops with the extra connection ready to go.

Edit: Well, I figured what the heck and installed the full 12.2.0.11 Intel Software package as well to replace the entire ProSet package that Sony originally provided on their support website and everything works exactly the same except now I have extra administrator tools because I selected that option during the setup. I also hit over 500 KB/S download off of the Intel website with the 5100 when I was archiving the 64-bit software. Screenshot has been added + 5100 Specs.

One last thing to mention is that I immediately burned original Vaio Z540 recovery discs when my laptop arrived and then right off the bat stripped my hard drive clean, erased the hidden EISA partition with DiskPart to recover the extra 10GB of HDD space, fresh install of all drivers + updates, added a few programs included on the Sony Software disc (PhotoShop Elements 6.0/ Premiere 4.0, Paintshop Pro X2, Roxio & WebCam) and a retail install of Vista Ultimate 32-bit. So my notebook is clean as you can get it. Later Peeps.

 

P.S. In case anyone is interested, here is the location of possibly the best Network diagnostic tools that you can use to gauge your system performance when using the Internet and to determine whether or not your Internet Service Provider is short changing your High Speed Internet Account! Spread the Word!

http://www.measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools

 

interesting thread.. so it seems like the 5300 is only better if you have a dual band 802.11n router?

 

i have the lenovo x200 7454-cto
with a 5300, i just wonder why it said the attena is 2X2
i know the other 2 is wwan upgradable
so that means there is only 2 attena for my 5300?

 

The 5300 card is indeed a more improved close cousin to the 5100 card. I don't think it would be a problem upgrading to a 5300 from a 5100 card.

 

haven't had any problems with my 5100.
I have a 2wire wireless g, so i cant say much about the signal strenght.
My router usually crashes, never had problems with my card except for running win 7 prebeta without drivers??

 

If you aren't connecting to a router that is 450Mbps capable, there should be little difference between the two. I upgraded a laptop to the 5300 from a broadcom piece of crap and I have another tha came with a 5100. I can't tell the difference.

 

One of my notebooks has the 4695 and connects at 144 mbps on a 2.4 ghz Netgear router. My other has a 5100 and can only do 72 mbps on the same network. I'm looking into the 5300 as we speak.

 

on my 5100 i have never had any problems at all and if you download the drivers directly from intel you also get a very useful program for it called my wifi technology. i have a constant 150mbs from my wireless n router and if i enable the throughput enhancement feature i get a solid 270-300mbs from the n router. i can stream 1080p content from my laptop to my ps3 fine with a little tweaking. 720p content on the other hand goes over just fine without any tweaks needed. i can see the 5300 having a better signal strength but i also see it having more interference considering there is more antenna picking it up.

 

go for the 5300 ...my G50VT came with the 5100 and it worked fine for about a day....then it started dropping connections like mad, got the 5300 off of eBay and workin' fine since. I also am able to pick up more networks around my area thanks to the extra antenna!

 

There is a comparison in the Lenovo forum btw the two. I think jonlumpkin tested both in his laptop on the D-Link DIR-655 router and didn't find a difference for most user's usages.

 

It's strange to hear about the connection drops of 5100. My vaio z never dropped a single connection with 5100, while downloading and uploading almost 1 TB data.

 

Nver had problems with 5100 connection dropping.... signal stays constant and data flows properly..

 

What about range? Is the 5300 better in this subject?

 

My 5300 maxes out at 130 Mb/s with a DLink N router.

 

I going to install the Intel 5300 on Wednesday when I get the part. Right now I have the Intel 5100 in my X200. The speeds are fine most of the time, but the connection drops at random times. It's especially weird because my wireless router is only about 10 feet away; it will never connect at the 300Mbps 5GHz speed, only around 130Mbps. Hopefully the 5300 will fix all this. I've already taken apart my computer to make sure there is an antenna for the 5300 and indeed the Lenovo has the third antenna in a sleeve.

 

Have you searched the forum on the topic? I seem to recall reading Intel 5100 and 5300 having connection dropping problems...

 

I don't seem to have this problem with my 5100... it works... only time the connection drops is when i'm on notebookreview.com... works well on all other sites lol..

 

D-Link forums for each of their routers should have a sticky about the specific router setting that you NEED to use to achieve maximum throughput, along with specific notes for 20/40 channel support for Intel adapters. Also go read through that benching thread about how to set the 5100/300 in Windows to force 40MHz "fat" channel.

5100 dropping: I've seen lots of people complain about this but I've NEVER had a problem with the 5100 dropping, only routers.

OTOH I run in g mode (DIR-615) since N mode kept kicking b&g mode connects off even when no active N links were up, so off it went as I'm more interested in using my legacy WiFi devices than a little extra wireless bandwidth. After all I can always connect 100M ether if I need more bandwidth(exceedingly rarely). I easily get 30yd. of range to my router with the 5100 and see about 8 or 9 others in the area, some of which must be over 100yd. distant and still look like a 20% or so signal under linux.

Had a 5100 in an MSI GT725 since March(beginning).

Had a 5300 in a 625(IIRC) for a couple of months, which didn't seem to be much better than the 5100 in terms of general every day speed/range although under certain circumstances I have no doubt that the extra antenna would be useful. The 625 went back because it had an unfortunate tendency to randomly lockup under network load under both linux AND Windows XP.

 

DSPR_2,
I have an ASUS M51, it only has 2 antennas, I've read that you managed to implement the 3rd antenna. Could you help me a little. Here or maybe in email:
ferry[at]digitalfm[dot]hu
Thank you in advance

 

mmm dont know which Dlink router you have. I'm gettin 300 Mb/s with my 5300 on my dir 655. Here the link I found to get 300

http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=616.0