Question Need suggestion for a wifi card

welchs101

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Sep 18, 2008
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I am building a system and while i could buy a MOB with wifi a friend said i should not do this but rather buy an external wifi card that plugs into my machine or something like this. Do you all have any suggestions on what would be a good wifi card to get. Also, is "wifi card" the correct terminology or is it called something else?
 

Zerk2012

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I am building a system and while i could buy a MOB with wifi a friend said i should not do this but rather buy an external wifi card that plugs into my machine or something like this. Do you all have any suggestions on what would be a good wifi card to get. Also, is "wifi card" the correct terminology or is it called something else?
Most of the time you can buy a board with built in WIFI for less than board and a decent card.
Motherboard WIFI has came a long way in the past few years.
 

welchs101

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Sep 18, 2008
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i agree that board with build in wifi from a cost perspective is nice.....it appears to be cheaper. my concern is that the board would not be upgradable as a wifi card would be. i dont know maybe i am over thinking this .......
 
In some ways it is almost impossible to not get wifi on new motherboards not sure why. I never would never use wifi on a gaming machine. It would be silly for the people who spend huge money to tweak 1 extra fps for say special memory support to then take the chance of lag playing on wifi.

In any case it is up to you. If you are going to chase very high end wifi cards with say 4x4 mimo where you need 4 antenna then you are likely going to have to use add in pcie cards. They also make USB based devices if you do not want internal cards but there are few devices to choose from espeically high end devices.

Now many motherboards even those without wifi come with a special m.2 type E slot. This allows you to easily swap out the wifi if technology changes. Not sure if it is part of the chipset itself or why almost all boards have wifi support or these special m.2 sockets.