A Closer Look
We find some warranty notes inside the box next to a quick start guide. I doubt many will need the guide, but it’s still good that it has been included.
There’s also a cradle with USB extension cord for remote placement. With it, you can place the wireless adapter on top of your chassis, a shelve, or just not have it sticking out of the system itself and thereby achieve a better reception and not having it in the way. An adapter as large as this one, it can easily get in the way of other connectors on stationary systems and for a portable system, it easily gets in the way for yourself. Multiple problems solved with a single solution.
The cradle is naturally USB 3.0 which is easily recognized by the blue colur inside the plug.
The wireless adapter itself comes with a pop-off cap that protects the connector when you’re on the go and you have it packed together with your laptop and all of its parts.
The adapter’s design around the end with the USB connector matches the cradle perfectly and provides you with a good overall look and as if it was just one piece of equipment.
The external antennas can be set in three different positions where the default one is closed. You can also angle them at 90 degrees and 180 degrees relative to the adapter.
I don’t know what you did, but these results in 5Ghz are dramatic.
I have the ASUS USB-AC68 in combination with the Netgear Nighthawk r7000.
I did real world tests between my Thecus N5550 NAS in a Raid5 config and a Toshiba Notebook (4core i7) and also my Wacom Companion 2 (2core i7) on a 7m range. I copied a 100Mb and a 1Gb file to the NAS and back. I got up and download speeds between 500 à 600Mbps …Even if I start using USB 2 my real world speed is above your results.
I do agree with you, Paul. My tests show that ASUS USB-AC68 is much more powerful. But I used 1, 5 and 15 TCP connection at the same time just to test wireless network itself.
Did some testing on 802.11n 2.4GHz and got very surprised, on the negative side.