A quick look at the Intel 7260 11ac WIFI adaptor
As some of you may know my new laptop came with the Intel 4360 11ac adapter limited to 1x1 (receive/transmit) channels
This is limited to a maximum connection speed of 433.3Mbps, this particular adapter did very well and got close to 350Mbps of actual speed
So here we are with the bigger brother the 7260
This particular card is a 2x2 antenna arrangement, and hence can double the max theoretical throughput to 866.6Mbps, both antennas can receive and transmit simultaneously (vs 1x1 where one receives other transmits)
The actual miniPCIe card is tiny and is exact same layout as the 3160 except twice as much bandwidth can be moved about.
I was a little worried as HP are notorious for White;listing WLAN cards, where only a very few types are allowed to be used by BIOS)
As this particular WLAN card is an option in the 17" envy I took the risk, rest is history.
With Windows 8.1 the card is detected and drivers installed
A slightly older driver set where 'Throughput enhancement' option is not yet available, no biggy as it seems to do very little)
There really is not much to say about this card other than how does it perform, only reason for getting this topend card.
So here we go, click the picture for an expanded view.
11ac download
11ac Upload/transmit
Notebook, HP Envy 15-k208tx
Server, 6x2TB RAID6 array on a caching controller.
Router - Netgear R7000 1300Mbps 1ac / 600Mbps 11ng
Test file 4.1GB Windows 10 build 9926 ISO
560Mbps download and 360Mbps upload very respectable indeed
When you get to these speeds, you have to make sure there are no bottlenecks in your system as it will only be as fast as slowest component.
ie the Hard Disk at either/both end also need to be able to read/write at least as fast as the WLAN card can bring the data over.
As you can see the HDD in the Envy is struggling to write the data as it comes in, this seems to be an issue I'll have to look into as performance is quite slow with writes.
I'll do some more testing with setting up a RAM drive on laptop
Performance difference
Intel 7260 11ac 560/360Mbps from 866.6Mbps max = 65%/42% utilised
Intel 3160 11ac 350/290Mbps from 433.3Mbps max = 81%/67% utilised
Ralink USB 11na 110Mbps from 300Mbps = 37% utilised
Ralink USB 11ng 150Mbps from 300Mbps = 50% utilised
If a system comes with the Intel 3160 it's no biggy as it performs very admirably, I would think no real point in upgrading to the 7260 unless every bit per second is precious.
The Intel WLAN cards are very efficient and use the given bandwidth much better than 11n cards have, where even getting 1/2 the advertised speed is not all that common.