So there are many companies offering WiFi chips: Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, Realtek etc… who makes the best ones?
I am sorry if this question sounds stupid, because in the tech world it’s best to compare the products themselves, not the brand. However I am not familiar with how this sector of the hardware industry works and product lines of each company. So I hope your answers can enlighten me and others in the same boat.
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Its ethernet,they make the best ones!
If you plan to run or test Linux, stick to Intel. Some vendors tend to have proprietary drivers and do not contribute to the Linux kernel, meaning the code is not reviewed or packaged with most distributions.
I’ve got a mb with intel and Realtek. The intel port has nothing but problems. Because of this I’ve sworn off intel networking.
Intel, just not the Intel Killer ones.
I always pop in the latest Intel WIFi card (AC, WIFI 6, 6E, now WIFI 7) and it works like a charm and has driver updates all the time using Intel driver assistant app that checks at PC boot.
I personally always had issues with Intel wifi cards but when I make this statement I would like to say this problem seems to be with anything IBM ITX systems and Thinkpads of last year.
Freaking things would die left right and centre.
Good wifi, idk anymore so many suck
Just upgraded my Intel chip to a mediately/AMD relabeled one. Twice the speeds now, so it’s kinda crazy.
That doesn’t sound very informative. Your older chip might have been WiFi 5 and now you perhaps upgraded to a chips with WiFi 6. Of course it’s going to be faster.
There’s so much more that goes into how good a wifi is even on board/system level than just who makes the wifi chip. Even within the same company it can wildly differ. It depends on the board design, layout, noise isolation, chipset drivers, antenna design, antenna placement, and manufacturing. If the wifi on your device sucks, there probably wasn’t enough engineers working on testing it when integrating into their system or good testing on the production line to catch defects. Sometimes something like a missing screw can mess with the radiation pattern. Source: RF test engineer.
For PC it’s definitely Intel.
Intel > Qualcomm > Realtek > Mediatek.
Get an AX210 or AX411, the later is technically better but is only compatible with Intel CPUs that support CNVio2.
IMO realtek is worst, worse than mediatek.
Avoid broadcom if you use Linux. Their drivers suck…
+1 for the AX210. Its $20 on Amazon. If you have an open PCIe x1 slot you can get an adapter and for under $40 you end up with a wifi+bluetooth card that beats any branded cards from the likes of D-Link or Netgear which are probably using proprietary broadcom or realtek chips.
Plus its upgradeable. When WiFi 7 rolls around its another $20-30 for a drop in replacement.
On Linux I’d recommend MediaTek, Intel adapters just suck there for some reason
Intel have had lots of WIFI6 driver issues tho. Hopefully they get better code quality on newer cards.
their 6E cards have pretty much patched up the problems. My laptop has a normal 6 adapter and has connectivity issues out the ass. I tried upgrading to a 6E module, but unfortunately the slot doesn’t support a 6E adapter
Where does AMD fit? They do make WiFi chips and early AM5 boards had them
BE200 is already available for basically the same price
Realistically, even the cheapest Realtek ones have been “good enough” for the past years. I’ve been gaming competitively on a 10$ 2.4ghz one without issues.
Contrary to popular believe I don’t think “gaming competitively” is anything hard on any modern network card. In my IT life, bandwidth is sometimes the issue, latency is sometimes the issue, but latency caused by the wifi card itself has almost never been the issue, and gaming uses miniscule amount of bandwidth.
Competitive online gaming has been feasible on wi-fi for a long number of years now. Obviously ethernet is better, it just is plain and simple. However wi-fi gets about 90% there and the remaining 10% between wi-fi and ethernet won’t make someone a pro gamer or not. wi-fi is seriously fine in 2023, the latency is low and the throughput is high
that’s not a very hard workload
In my experience Intel is generally best, but they all make duds, including Intel. I use a Qualcomm in my laptop at work and it’s very good.
Indeed, but most people I know that demand the best NICs (not necessarily wifi ones), have low latency gaming in mind, thus my comment. What I was trying to say was that even cheap ones, are “good enough” for such scenarios.
Generally Intel is the most regarded. But I got motherboard with Mediatek’s wifi 6e chip and it works just fine, and bluetooth range is slightly better than by old desktop with Qualcomm wifi ac chip and much better than my laptop with Intel wifi 6 chip.
Intel’s drivers are constantly fighting with Windows Update. I deliberately buy MOBOs with 3+ NVME slots so I can upgrade my wifi when I periodically upgrade my network --and the last three Intel (proper Intel, not 3rd party) mini-cards I’ve acquired have been plagued with endless Win11 v Intel driver conflicts.
yeah, intel’s chipsets are also the flakiest on bluetooth, and it’s completely down to drivers (apple has them working pretty solidly on macbooks but NUCs are noticeably worse and rando motherboards with intel bluetooth are a pain in the ass)
Drivers are optional updates and can be disabled or not used? Or are you using Home? I have always used windows professional since XP so maybe home doesn’t offer if, but drivers are listed under advanced/optional updates and I have the system set to NOT download from windows update unless I tell it to, which is generally ok for like Bluetooth drivers from Intel which are basic anyway.
Wallstreetbets ruined the word “regarded” for me, I started laughing when I read the first sentence.
I think it’s absolutely regarded that just using the word regarded once on Reddit can get your account banned fully automatic if somebody clicks report.