WMP300N - Wireless-N PCI Adapter product reviews

When I first saw this little unit I thought I had been shipped the Mk2 of an Imperial Interrogator Droid or as a friend put it a scale model of an Imperial Space Mine, however as weird as it looks the mass of aerials is part of what allows this little unit to perform at the speeds it does. Installation is very simple (if you follow the instructions in the manual it is anyway) and once installed and connected to my wireless network I brought up the wireless properties dialog to see what speed it reckoned it had connected with, and I was impressed when I saw the 300Mbps value sitting there in the dialog box.

Next I had to test the speed of the unit, seeing as I had already done a file transfer test for the Wireless-N Gigabit Router so rather than repeating myself to get the same results I decided to trial it with an online speed test, now I can hear you all saying you can't trust these online speedtests, and that is why I decided to do it as a comparative test between a 802.11g wireless device and this 802.11n wireless device, so I decided on a speedtest site html://speedtest.xmission.com which uses a flash based test, I then decided to calculate it as an average over 6 tests on each device.

Well now the results and these were where I was quite surprised. First I'll give the 802.11g results.

Avg Download Speed: 822.7kbps (102.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

Now for the 802.11n results.

Avg Download Speed: 7753.5kbps (969.2 KB/sec transfer rate)

Now that is what I call a speed increase.

NB: The test also measures upload speeds as well, however due to some strange network settings on the test rig for the 802.11g connection that we couldn't identify this has been omitted, if we get this resolved we will add the results to this review later.

So in summary this is one wicked unit when paired with a 802.11n Wireless Router.