Stock wireless in Clevo p170hm/p150hm

What card is in the stock Clevo's? I see the upgrade options are 2x2, and 3x3 antenna's from both Intel and Bigfoot, but I can't find out what the stock one is as it only says b/g/n without a model number.

 

I think its a Realtek something. I was browsing the drivers for my machine and found for Intel, for Bigfoot and for Realtek. It has to be Realtek.

P.S. Although mine is Intel 6230, so Im not sure if there is anything beside Intel, Bigfoot and Realtek. Maybe there is....

 

The stock chipset in current models is the Realtek RTL8188CE. You can find the drivers here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/573379-clevo-driver-thread.html

 

Does anyone here have the stock wireless or did you all upgrade to the intel or the bigfoot? It seems like the biggest differences just between the other four options is throughput. Throughput probably wouldn't affect me considering my ISP is 15mbit and they provide the router and it's still just G not N.

 

The stock RTL8188CE isn't all that bad, it's not amazing but it's not the worst, the csr bluetooth onboard chip is decent enough and does it's job.

I did end up changing out to another card but for reasons that mostly had nothing to do with it's quality.

The only real quirk I experienced with the RTL8188CE was that it seemed to cap data transfers at exactly 11.3Mbps when on N and around 8Mbps on G on my router for some reason despite perfect signal and high connection speed indicated, this was mildly problematic since I have a 22Mbps connection.

As for changing out I didn't go Intel or Bigfoot due to personal preference.

 

I changed my computer from a stock Realtek card to one of the Intel 6200 series cards myself. I noticed a change in my signal strength (about 15-20% from what I've seen) and the performance has been good. We have a few around the office here that have upped to the Bigfoot cards and they are performing better. I may switch to that card eventually...

 

I wouldn't if I were you. The Bigfoot card is good hardware, but the software is terrible. I have to use generic Atheros drivers with my 1102 because the Bigfoot network manager is bloated and unstable. They don't seem to have much interest in improving it either. There was a driver bug that prevented access to the iTunes store once version 10.5 of that program was released, and only a couple days ago did Bigfoot release a driver to fix it. This issue is not present when using the generic Atheros drivers, by the way.

If I had it to do all over again, I would have spent half the money I did and stuck with an Intel wireless card. Good benchmark numbers mean nothing when you can't get the software to work consistently.

 

I have a 170 and the stock realtek. Its just fine. I have a 25mb internet connection and, just like the Intel 52xx in my Sager 9262 before it, its capable of maxing it out. I do have a very good wireless setup though, as far as range and interference though, and get pretty much 100% perfect signal strength and reliability, therefore I dont know how it would function in situations where your wireless setup is obstructed or otherwise nonoptimal.

 

I didn't "upgrade" but rather chose the intel 6230 when choosing a config. I read around these forums that the stock card performs very poorly. I would have chosen a better card but the budget was limited and I wanted Bluetooth to be available.

 

If you upgrade in the future from the stock card to one of the intel's is it just the card that changes, or do you have to install new antennas?

 

The upgraded cards also require more antennas (not new antennas- just more of them). Your model should have three installed though- two of them just won't be in use if you only have the stock WiFi.

 

In the past few months I've tried about 10 different wireless cards in a few different notbooks.

The best overall performance for me was with the BFN 1103 with 3 anennas and connecting to a ZyXEL 5715 450Mbps Simultanious Duel-Band Router with upgraded high gain antennas.

Where this card had an advantage over the Intel 6300 was in quickness in connecting and signal strenghth measured with the inSSIDer program.

In the same room as the router the 1103 shows an average signal strength of 18db while the Intel 6300 is 24db on the 2.4ghz band.I'm sometimes at 10db on the 5ghz band.Moving about 15" away not in line of sight and through cement walls lowers the signal strength to the high 30s db.

Speedtest.net has a big difference depending on tme of day for all cards.

Download speeds are largely dependent on the site connecting to

My router connects straight out of the wall in my centrally wired high rise apartment building and 10 building complex in a very large city.

The same held true putting the Intel 6205 against the BFN 1102.These are 2 very good cards and worthy of your upgrade money.

I presently have no need of BT.

The Reatek RTL8192SE and Intel WiFi Link103N I tried both suffered from frequent disconnects when not in line of sight and close with the router and going through cement walls in my apartment.In the same room as the router they worked fine.

InSSIDer at times would show about 50 other SSIDs depending on time of day on the 2.4ghz band.Only 1 other shows up on 5ghz band.I use the 5ghz band unless doing simultanios tasks.

Carefully choosing the least used channel(auto select not recommended) and WPA2 with 40mhz channel width yielded the best results.

Downloading the 3GB Windows 7 x64 ISO from digital river takes about 16 minutes on average while a 350mb TV show in uTorrent averages 2 minutes.

A new driver download from Nvidia is quick as a flash.

Downloading anything from the Sager site is painful.

 

Heh, looks like BFN pulled the driver that was supposed to fix iTunes, WoW, and BF3 off their website. Again, I will note that I have had absolutely no problems with anything using Atheros drivers with the 1102, so Bigfoot's software must be very very broken on a fundamental level. And in an OCZ-style move, Bigfoot likes to blame everyone else but them for these problems.