Intel® 6230 Advanced-N 802.11A/B/G/N LAN and Bluetooth Card or not

Should I get the Intel® 6230 Advanced-N 802.11A/B/G/N LAN and Bluetooth Card on the Lotus P150EM-SE or just save $25?

 

It depends on your answer to a few questions:

1) Do you care about Intel WiDi?
2) Does your router or those you frequently use support 300Mb/s wireless speeds?
3) Do you frequently do LAN file transfers at home, or primarily just internet browsing and such?

The 6230 will only work at the full rated 300Mbps if your router supports it. You'll see some range benefits over the stock card due to the extra antenna, but nothing too significant. Overall performance and latency are much better than the stock card if you have a compatible router though.

The Bigfoot cards on the other hand have much better latency (e.g, low lag) when compared to either Intel or stock cards. They use a proprietary Quality of Service software to maintain the better performance. If you do a lot of online gaming, they may be worth looking at.

 

1. No
2. No, but I'm could be replacing it(that comes down to when it dies or has problems with IPv6 when my ISP changes over to it).
3. I don't do LAN file transfers at home, but that could change once i get a new router with a USB port to allow my portable into a file server. So right now its online gaming with some internet browsing.

My router is a Linksys WRT54G

 

Anandtech tests showed that a 3 antennae wireless solution had nearly double the range of the nearest 2 antennae solution in one test, and dramatically more in others.

That's not insignificant.

For many customers, range is what they're after, not so much throughput.

 

You might want to check my quote again, I was talking about 1 antenna versus 2. I never mentioned 3x3 solutions in this thread

If you're referring to these tests, which you've listed before: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4590/bigfoots-killern-1102-wireless-networking-vs-the-world/7

They don't show a drastic difference between 1x1 and 2x2 in range, just the 3x3.