Want a new Wifi card and router

I don't have my laptop on me so I don't know what card is currently in it, but I want to get a 450Mbps router, so I need ideas for a decent card and router.

 

450mbps requires 3 antennas IIRC, and I'm not sure if your laptop has those in it. You can't just pop a new card in any old machine and hit 450mbps.

 

Also there's a shortage of good 450mbps routers.
Linksys E4200 seems to be the only one (450mbps is possible only on 5GHz band which is a good thing btw) at least until Netgear presents its new lineup.

So unless you're willing to wait your choice is rather nonexistent- Linksys E4200 and Intel 6300.

 

What about a 300Mbps combo then?
One that supports dd-wrt would be great!

The Asus RT-N56U looks pretty good.

 

That's easier- a lot of Wi-Fi cards support 300mbps so you may not be forced to update yours (although it's quite likely that whatever you have in your laptop supports 2.4GHz band only)
As for a router- Asus RT65U is not supported by DD-WRT as of now. I've heard it will be but I'm too lazy to check it.

I would still go for Netgear WNDR3700 it's tested, supported by DD-WRT and has great hardware. It may not look like RT65U but that's about it.

 

Seconded. I just bought one of those Netgears, and it's been much more stable and insanely higher performance than my old WRT54GL. Not quite as good wireless coverage, but I can get a second cheap wireless N AP to add to the network.

 

The Netgear gets good reviews I think I'll get it as I do quite like the DD-Wrt firmwares. I think I'll pick it up on the weekend and see if my card supports 300 when I get home, I have a feeling it won't though. THanks for the info guys.

 

np. It's a little tricky first getting it to the DD-WRT firmware, so do your reading beforehand. There's a specific DD-WRT mini firmware for that router in a special format that will basically unlock it so you can use it.

 

I had a Linksys that was like that! After initially getting it done was just a standard firmware update after.

 

True but DD-WRT offers more features but doesn't offer the best performance and Netgear firmware has more features than Linksys one so I don't recommend flashing just for the sake of it.
Read here for more.

 

That's good to know, thanks.

 

Aye. I'm actually running Tomato on mine. I would be running the default firmware, but it won't do port-rewrite forwarding(!), so I couldn't run RDP on a non-standard port. It will do normal port forwarding though. You'd think that would be a basic feature... anywho, I needed the port-rewrite feature more than I wanted the guest AP feature of the default firmware, so I switched but if you don't need the features, give the default firmware a try. It's very good, and has nifty things like the guest wireless AP built in that aftermarket firmwares don't to my knowledge.

Edit: Googling says that DD-WRT does, but I'm not gonna take that performance hit

 

According to the device manager the K52f has the Intel 1000 b/g/n network card, is that capable of 300Mbps? Couldn't find an answer on google.

Edit: Found it, the Intel site wouldn't open last night when I looked, but the spec sheet says supports speeds up to 300Mbps.