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Page 2 of 3 Performance: This review isn’t really an in-depth ‘performance shootout’ as such, so to test the performance of the cards we’ll just be conducting a couple of simple file transfer tests on each adapter. Having setup an FTP server on our server we’ll be transferring a 1.23GB file to and from the server for each card. To get an idea of how these cards compare to normal wireless networking we’ll be comparing it to the 54Mbps 802.11g wireless adapter from my notebook (an Intel 2915ABG Mini-PCI Adapter) as well as to a standard 100Megabit Ethernet network connection. By all accounts we should see a big speed increase for the Wireless-N adapters over the old 802.11g adapter, but given the claimed speed capability of these ‘N’ wireless adapters, I’d also expect them to outclass the 100Megabit Ethernet connections as well, which would be a first for me to see for a wireless connection. Firstly – Transmitting Data: 
Well this is quite a surprise. While the D-Link adapters did have a big speed improvement over the old 802.11g adapter, the standard 100Mbps Cat5e cable network adapter has still blown them all away. The fact that the wireless access point we’re using has a claimed 300Mbps wireless speed, but only 100Mbps Ethernet speed really doesn’t seem to have affected anything, as not one adapter even came close to utilising the full 100Mbps of the access point’s Ethernet connection, far from it in fact. The best performer of the wireless cards was actually the USB adapter, the DWA-140, which was another surprise, as it only managed a connection speed of 130Mbps, compared to the other two adapters connecting at 300Mbps. But it hardly seemed to matter, as even when connecting at ‘only’ 130Mbps, it didn’t come close to utilising all its available bandwidth. Next – Receiving Data: 
The graph for the cards receiving the 1.23GB file is very similar to the other one, except with the Ethernet connection really maxing out its 100Mbps and the USB adapter gaining quite a bit of speed, able to receive data 36% faster than it’s able to transmit it, now that’s something! The ExpressCard adapter (DWA-643) also had a mild speed increase of around 12%, the remaining two adapters had nearly identical readings. It’s really quite surprising that not one card comes even remotely close to its claimed potential speed of 300Megabits per second, or even close to a bog-standard 100Mb/s Ethernet adapter. Instead we’ve seen them max out around 50Megabits per second, very disappointing for what is meant to be the next leap forward in wireless networking technology.
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