ASUS PCE-AC66 Dual-Band 802.11 AC PCIe Wireless Card Review

ASUS PCE-AC66 WLAN Control Center Software

Once you install the ASUS PCE-AC66 WLAN card you need to start the PC and install the utility/driver for it to start working.

Once you install the ASUS PCE-AC66 WLAN card you need to start the PC and install the utility/driver for it to start working.

After clicking next through a few menus it will ask you if you’d like to install just the driver or the utilities and the driver. We opted for both as we wanted the ability to adjust the Tx signal power of the antennas.

After a few seconds the software was installed and you just need to click finish. The installation time of the software utility and driver took just a couple minutes on our high-end desktop PC with an SSD, so it is very painless and simple.

When you fire up the ASUS PCE-AC66 WLAN Control Center Software for the very first time you’ll find yourself on the survey menu that shows you all the networks that are within range. We picked up nearly 25, which is far more than we got with the any other network card and many had excellent signal strength!

Over on the configuration menu you can tinker with the Tx Power Adjustment, which allows you do dial in the best transmission power for your wireless network and setup. By default everything is set to 80 mW, but you can lower it down to 1 mW or raise it up to 200 mW. We found that increasing the power just 10-20mW did help performance, but going too high would hurt connectivity. If you adjust the power settings be sure to do slowly and run performance tests after each adjustment.

When you are in the status section you’ll find out basic information about your wireless setup and are able to see the signal strength.

Under status there is a sub menu for IP settings that show you both the host and Ethernet information for your connection. It looks like ASUS has a typo here as we’ve never heard of Enthernet Information before. At the bottom of the IP Settings menu you’ll find that you can go a bit deeper with pages for IP Release, IP Refresh and Ping.

Having the ability to do some basic network checks and tasks from the ASUS software utility for the PCE-AC66 adapter card are nice as you can do it all from just one window.