So my PCI wireless card is shitting out on me and I don't have a grand replacemtn for it. I have a USB version of the same chipset and I have a Wireless G card that I could use instead.
The USB is also Wireless N.
Is it better to sacrifice some speed and use the USB chip or have full speed on an older band with the wireless G PCI chip?
depends on if you have usb 2.0 or usb 3.0.
Usb wifi cards are in general worse then their pcie counterparts. Something about being linked via pcie just seems to make them more stable and more reliable. I have to run a wifi card as the router is in another room, and the pcie ac wifi card i have is as stable as any wired connection I've ever ran.
It's USB 2.0. I have 3.0 slots available, however. The only thing is that the 3.0 slots obviously won't help much more than the 2.0 :|
usb 2.0 about 60 mb/s usb 3.0 625 mb/s. It will make a differnce
Problem is I don't have a budget XD I'm just wondering which card will be better for me in the long run.
i would recomend the pci card because even though the usb supports n it is still limited by the speed of port.
USB 2.0 runs up to 480 Mbps. Wireless N runs up to 300 Mbps. So I would stick with the USB N adapter. Moving from N to G simply because it's on a PCI card doesn't make much sense. G runs at 54 Mbps. Why would go move back to G? A USB 2.0 is more than capable of handling N speeds.
pci is always better and faster. If you have space and slot for pci-e card go with pci-e.If you don't, well then you have to go with usb... if you want wifi.
When you can afford it I would suggest moving to a PCI model simply due to the fact of improved reception. The PCI card models generally come with much larger antennas, and sometimes multiple antennas. This will give you better throughput through better reception. The entire USB/PCI bandwidth thing isn't an issue if you plan on sticking with N. (In fact you can stick with the USB N if your reception is perfect.)