Intel 7260HMW 802.11AC Versus Intel 7260HMW BN 802.11n

Test Results at 15 Feet:

To test the wireless performance we used the Alienware M17x R4 gaming laptop that was directly connected to the ASUS RT-AC66U Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit 802.11ac Router. The Alienware M17x R4 features an Intel i7-3610QM CPU with 6GB RAM running Windows8 64-Bit, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M video card. We used the laptop to run LAN Speed Server and then ran LAN Speed Test on the Intel NUC to test the throughput of both wireless cards. We took our Alienware laptop and the ASUS RT-AC66U router and moved it 10-feet and then 30-feet away from the test machine to check out performance with both 1MB and 100MB packets.

Both Intel 7260 wireless cards ran Intel PROSet/Wireless software version 16.7.0 as that was the most recent driver available at the time of testing.

When it comes to wireless performance the we used LAN Speed Test to check the performance of the included the included Intel 7260BN 802.11n Wireless Card. This is an entry level 2×2 wireless card (TX/RX Streams) that runs only on the 2.4GHz band with a theoretical peak speed rating of 300 Mbps. We ran LAN Speed Test on the NUC with the wireless card to test the throughput and found roughly 60Mbps (7MB/s) average write speeds and 65-85Mbps (8-10MB/s) average read speeds.

We switched out Intel 7260HMW BN card with the Intel 7260HMW and re-ran the test with the identical settings except this time we switched to the 5GHz band. This time around we found the throughput and found roughly 160Mbps (23MB/s) average write speeds and 285Mbps (41MB/s) average read speeds. This is a around a 3x performance improvement for write speeds and roughly 4x for read speeds!

These are respectable scores, but let’s see what happens when we double the distance and throw a couple additional interior walls into the mix.