Which is better?

[CodeZero68]

Intel® Dual Band AC 7260 802.11 A/AC/B/G/N 2.4/5.0GHz + Bluetooth 4.0 / WiDi | Up to 300/867Mbps

or

Bigfoot Networks Killer™ Dual Band Wireless-N 1202 - 802.11A/B/G/N Wireless LAN Module + Bluetooth 4.0 | Up to 300Mbps

the reason im asking is because i hear that bigfoot is better but it lacks the 802.11ac and i was wondering if that would cause the tables to turn more towards the intel one

 

[bill001g]

Your first issue is neither will be any better than your router. The features must match to get the any advantage out of the device. For example it does you no good to buy 802.11ac if your router also does not support it.

Do not be mislead by advertising. Intel actually makes their own chips unlike almost every other vendor on the market. This bigfoot devices uses a Atheros AR9462 chip. The fundamental abilities will be similar to any other card that uses this chip. For example the liteon WCBN611AH is the same basic card. bigfoot networks does try to optimize the drivers but I have seen people who have had massive issue with the drivers used on the imbedded ethernet on motherboards using the killer software so I am not sure. Hard to say how much actual real world advantage you get from this product line compared to the extra costs.

I am going to bet your house will make far more difference than any particular interface. This is why you see every card made have people complaining it does not work and others saying it is the best on the market. I suspect you are comparing the difference in the houses more than the difference in the products.

 

[CodeZero68]

so get a rounter that supports ac and get the intel one?

 

[bill001g]

That is a hard call. 802.11ac unfortunately only runs on the 5g band. This means it will run faster but have less ability to penetrate the walls in the house that running 802.11n on the 2.4g band. The only thing that you can really say is 802.11ac will be faster in most cases than 802.11n when you compare 2 connections both using the 5g band.

The true answer to which is better always comes comes down to a persons particular house and what types of interference they are getting from their neighbors.

A key point to remember when you are looking at any network speed is you are almost always limited by your ISP connection to the internet. In most cases even a very poor wireless signal will be much faster than your ISP connection. The only true advantage to putting more network speed both wired and wireless on your router is if you are transferring data between devices within your house. Even then unless you are doing major data replication or some high end video streaming your average network devices will work just fine.