Asus PCE-AC68 802.11ac Dual-Band Wireless Adaptor Review

Test Method & Admin Panel

In order to take our testing methodology up to the next level, our storage and networking test platform has seen a radical upgrade take place. To push our networking and storage testing that bit further we have removed the Ivy Bridge platform and in its place a Supermicro server grade motherboard accompanied by an Intel Xeon CPU has been installed. This upgrade will allow use to test storage and networking products to a higher level in either a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2012 environment where applicable.

Test system:

• Supermicro C7Z87-OCE motherboard
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB (2GB for NASPT Testing)
• Corsair H100i
• BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 10 850W
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Asus PCE-AC68 Dual-Band wireless adaptor

We would like to thank Asus, BeQuiet, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible.

Software used:

• PassMark PerformanceTest Suite

Asus PCE-AC68 Wireless Utility

Built in network adaptors that ship with motherboards and notebooks for the most part don’t have any specific pieces of software that come with them, however when purchasing a third-party adaptor, management software and utilities for the most part is included. The PCE-AC68 is no different and whilst you can use the adaptor as normal through Windows’ own Network and Sharing Centre, Asus’ utility offers up many more options in an easy to use interface.

The most important features that the utility give access to and those that I recommend you enable is the Beamforming and Turbo QAM options. Not only do these enhance the speed at which the link between the router and adaptor runs at, the signal between the two is more directed resulting in a better user experience as a whole.

PassMark Advanced Network Test

The PassMark Advanced Network Test is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers. One of the systems acts as the server and will sit waiting for a connection whilst the other computer acts as a client. The client connects to the server and sends data to it for the duration of the test.

The network benchmark test will work with any type of TCP/IP connection. Including Ethernet, dial-up modems, ADSL, cable modems, local area networks (LAN), Wide area networks (WAN) and wireless networking (WiFi). The software has been optimized to use a minimum amount of CPU time, allowing even high-speed gigabit Ethernet connections to be benchmarked.

Users have the ability to change the following test parameters.

• The IP address of the machine acting as the server and the port number used for the test to help with firewall issues.
• The size of the data block used for each send request. It is also possible to select variable sized blocks to measure performance deltas as block size increases or decreases.
• The duration of the test.
• The protocol, either TCP or UDP. The TCP protocol is when data integrity is important (Errors are corrected using data re-transmission). UDP is used with applications that are tolerant to data loss such as video streaming.

The Advanced Network Test is part of the PerformanceTest suite which can be found on the PassMark website.

In each of our test configurations, the wireless router is tested at three different ranges, the first running within 10ft of the wireless client (in this case our test bench with the PCIe wireless card) and with a direct line of sight. After this the router is moved into another room around 20ft away without a direct line of sight. Moving even further away the router is placed at a range of over 40ft to push the wireless transmission to the max. In all situations, the router is tested in an environment where the building has solid brick walls and is connected to a laptop at each range to act as a local test client.

In each of the test charts, red indicates the furthest test, green the mid-range test and blue the direct line of sight. Where applicable the adaptor is tested on both the 2.4GHz band at 802.11n speeds and on the 5GHz band at 802.11ac speeds where available.