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  • JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Where can I get an RP-SMA antenna mount like the one that's included in this picture (the black thing holding the four antennas).

    I'm trying to position antennas in a better location than what is possible by sticking next to the digital cable coax port on the wall that's conveniently in a terrible location, which restricts where I can setup a modem+router, which therefore makes it that much more difficult to get good wifi signal strength.
  • Murloc - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    why not just get 4 single antenna mounts and glue them to something?
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Because it's not an elegant of a solution than getting a single triple antenna mount, which coincidentally is almost impossible to find.
  • djc208 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    I have a triple antenna setup with magnetic base and those connectors I got off of Newegg a few years ago when I was trying to set up a wireless receiver in a detached building to connect to the Wi-Fi in my house. Wasn't very expensive and works well. Allowed me to route the antennas from the card in the machine up to a higher point for better reception.
  • ikachu1 - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Bleh, hopefully ASUS supports this card in Win10 better than they have the PCE-AC68. Even with the latest drivers (released in December) I get a blue screen if I try to torrent something.
  • jasonelmore - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    lower incoming/outgoing connection count.
  • heffeque - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Buying a "state of the art" PCI wifi card... just to have to lower the connection count. Might as well buy a crappy wifi card if it isn't going to work any better.
  • Major_Kusanagi - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    It's not only the PCE-AC68 that has this issue- My (2015) Dell XPS 13 has the same problem with blue-screening from torrenting.
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    What are you torrenting with, exactly?
    There is no trust in clients after what uTorrent pulled off, maybe you`re dealing with something alike.
  • Techguy123 - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Don't use the latest one use ASUS PCE-AC68 utility 2.0.8.8. It's the one that works perfectly. There are a few things you need to do - change the start registry key Hkey_Local_Machine\System\ControlSet001\Services\BCM42RLY from the value 3 to the value 4 in Hex. That stops the missing file spamming in event viewer. Disable beamforming in Asus utility and then disable start up in task manager as you really need it. I found beamforming causes latency spikes.
  • Agent Smith - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    I too got fedup with Win10 bluescreen when torrenting so initially just used a virtual desktop but later switched to an enterprise version of Win7. The later option gave me no Win10 upgrade bags and full compatibilty with all my older software i'd bought.

    I think i'll wait another year before switching back to Win10 as theyre clearly too interested in pushing out features rather than fixing thousands of irritating bugs.
  • Agent Smith - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    Nags (not bags)
    Edit option please Nand?
  • CaedenV - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    The more I see of these fancy new cards, the more I keep thinking that there needs to be a nicer way to add this to my server and use it as an AP. Then, as newer and better cards come out ever 6-8 months I can get a much cheaper upgrade than replacing my entire SoHo router.
  • easp - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    I wouldn't assume that these things work well in access point mode.
  • Daniel Egger - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Meh, no Bluetooth...
  • Freakie - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    No... Bluetooth...? Is a USB dongle really that bad? Bluetooth doesn't exactly need the PCIE interface.
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    Well, laptops usually have wifi + bluetooth built into the same small add-in card.

    For a PCI-E WiFi card that will likely retail for over $150, it's not unreasonable to be disappointed that bluetooth wasn't an extra thrown in there as well.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    I think this post should have triggered your sarcasm detector.
  • name99 - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    1024QAM???
    What are the circumstances under which this EVER has the slightest chance of working? You'd figure even the background radio noise in the middle of nowhere would be too high to allow it to differentiate between levels. Is it designed for use in either deep space or at the South Pole?
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    It worked great when the card and router were 3 inches apart inside the anechoic chamber in Asus's RF lab. /facepalm
  • frostyfiredude - Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - link

    It'll need about 5dB RSSI over a same-bandwidth 256QAM transmission, which means -45dBm for the full 160Mhz down to -55dBm for 20Mhz. 160Mhz will cover basically across a room, 20Mhz will cover most of a 1 bedroom apartment.
  • name99 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    Seriously? The numbers are that optimistic.
    I look forward to seeing this tested.
    (I hope the various reviewers can arrange both the "urban" testing experience --- where the apartment is full of radio noise from neighbors --- and the sub-urban/rural testing experience where that's much less the case.)
  • Henk Poley - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    Interesting, do you maybe have a pointer to some documentation on necessary SNR for certain QAM encodings?
  • frostyfiredude - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    Here is one, not quite the same as what I found yesterday but close enough, you can see the pattern emerge and the ~5dB steps http://7signal.com/blog/802-11ac-migration-part-1-...

    QAM is rather efficient at increasing the symbol rate, errors are kept in check rather nicely. The QAM signal constellation shows why that is visually, compared to say PSK which is another method of encoding bits.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link

    Right. Anandtech was testing one few months back, and it never worked.
  • nagi603 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link

    2167 Mbps. Yeah. I wish there was some sort of measuring standard that actually meant something, and not "3mm from the insanely big antenna in an underground anechoic chamber testlab".

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