[SOLVED] Dedicated Wifi Card vs Onboard

[shadow85]

Currently I have a Asus Z390 STIX-E motherboard and I am using the onboard Wifi 802.11ac to connect to my home internet, mainly to play competitive fps games online.

Wondering, if there would be any benefit for me to install and use a high end dedicated PCIe Wifi adapter like the Asus AC3100 PCE-AC88, or Asus PCE-AX3000 wifi6 card (pending i get a wifi 6 router aswell).

Would it any way:
increase stability?
Lower ping at all?
Provide any other benefit purely for online gaming over the onboard Wifi from the Z390-STRIX-E?

 

[bill001g]

Likely makes no difference.

The only big advantage to the first card is that it extends the antenna away from the case. You could likely buy antenna like that for your current card.

You should not use any wifi for games. You do not care about how fast it runs what is most important is that it has consistent latency. Almost all problems with wifi are related to external interference. There is no magic wifi card that can solve the problem of you neighbors using their wifi and causing errors.

The wifi6 card may actually be worse because it attempt to use twice the bandwidth. This greatly increases you chance of interference.

What may actually help is to try to reduce the channel width. This will reduce the top speed but maybe you get less interference. Problem is everyone is putting in tri band routers and all these mesh systems which mean each of your neighbors maybe using all the channels.

The best solution is to not use wifi for game performance. Consider using powerline or moca instead. Moca will be faster but you need coax. Powerline is likely slower than wifi but it is much more stable and other than for downloading the games you will not notice it is slower.