ASUS Z87-Pro Intel Z87 LGA1150 Motherboard Review

Wi-Fi & LAN Testing

We wanted to test the Wi-Fi GO! wireless adapter in a real world application so we connected the antenna’s. installed it inside running Windows 7 64-bit and configured it using “Automatic” settings for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands. To test the wireless performance we used our custom water cooled Mini-ITX PC that was directly connected to the ASUS RT-AC66U Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit 802.11ac Router.

We used the desktop to run LAN Speed Server and then ran LAN Speed Test on the system with the wireless card to test throughput.

We left the router in default mode, so the SSID name for untouched and we let it automatically choose the channel to connect to. This means that the router was left in “Unsecure Mode” (for fastest data throughput), and with WMM / QoS turned ON. After connecting, we ran the PC application LAN Speed Test (LST) to measure file transfer and network speeds. LST builds a file in memory and then transfers the packet without the effects of windows file caching. It then reports the time and calculates the network speed. We ran inSSIDer to make sure the networks were not overlapping with any of the 20+ surrounding ones and they were not.

1MB Packets:

First up was the Wi-Fi Go! with 1MB packets. Our average upload to the server was 85.6Mbps and the average download was 233.0Mbps.

100MB Packets:

Increasing the packet size to 100MB we lost a little bit of performance from the 1MB tests. Our Upload speed dropped to 82.1Mbps, a loss of just over 3Mbps while our average download speed dropped to 178.1Mbps. That’s a loss of 55Mbps or 23.6% between the two series of tests!

Intel I217V 1MB Packets:

Running the LAN Speed Test over the wired network was obviously going to be much faster than the Wi-Fi GO!, our upload speed in the 1MB packet test was 819.6Mbps and our download speed was 925.5Mbps!

Intel I217V 100MB Packets:

Increasing the packet size to 100MB our upload performance dropped from 819.6Mbps to 799.6Mbps, not a major dip in the performance, the download speed remained virtually unchanged on the Intel I217V Gigabit Ethernet controller and averaged 925.4Mbps.