Nowadays, most desktop computers incorporate an integrated WiFi card on the motherboard, the same happens with laptops, where we have a PCIe WiFi card inside the equipment. Depending on the card model we have, we can achieve a higher or lower real speed of the connection. If you buy and use an external WiFi adapter, you will surely improve both the coverage received to have greater stability, as well as the real speed that you are going to achieve.
Strengths of using an external WiFi adapter
If you use an external WiFi adapter on your PC, depending on the technical characteristics of this adapter, you will be able to improve your connection in several aspects:
- Better WiFi signal reception: There are external WiFi adapters with high-gain external antennas, this allows us to receive the wireless signal much better, so we will have greater coverage.
- Greater connection stability: we can improve the jitter in cases where we are at a medium-far distance from the main router, as long as we use WiFi cards with external antennas, as in the previous case.
- best actual speed: while computers and laptops have cards with one or two internal (or external) antennas, there are WiFi card models that have up to 3 antennas, with the aim of achieving greater performance in real connections.
- Versatility: when you buy a WiFi adapter with a USB interface, if you use several computers you will be able to change the WiFi adapter and always carry it with you, in order to achieve the best overall performance regardless of the computer where you are going to connect.
Other aspects that you should also assess is that desktop computers that have a WiFi card insidegenerally have external antennas to connect them to the card RP-SMA connectorshowever, we do not have a “base” of antennas, so the antennas stay behind the PC, making signal reception clearly worse.
If a WiFi network card is used via USB, we will be able to connect the adapter to any USB port on the front of the box, so we will have a better reception for the simple fact that the location of the card is much better. We should never put a WiFi card with obstacles, because this makes us have worse reception, unless we have the router in the same room since the signal is attenuated very little and we will hardly notice it. Generally, if we connect near the router, we simply use an Ethernet network cable, but at medium-far distances is where we do use WiFi connectivity.
Recommended models
The first thing we should look at when buying a WiFi adapter is the number of antennas it has, its gain, and even the Wi-Fi 6 standard that we have on the device. Next, we are going to recommend some models with Wi-Fi 6 that are highly recommended, and also high-gain Wi-Fi 5 models.
The first model that we are going to recommend is the ASUS USB-AX56, a WiFi 6 dual-band model of the AX1800 class. This card incorporates dual external antennas for the best possible signal reception.
Another highly recommended model is the D-Link DWA-X1850, an AX1800-class WiFi 6 dual-band device. In this case the antennas are internal, but it has a very good signal reception as we have verified in RedesZone.
In case you have a router with Wi-Fi 5 and you don’t mind buying a card with this technology instead of Wi-Fi 6, one of the best models is the NETGEAR A7000. This model is dual band AC1900, and has a drop-down external antenna to achieve a better wireless signal.
ASUS also has a WiFi card with high gain antennas, in this case it is AC1300 class dual band, but it has great reception and we can put it on a table as it has an extension cable.
As you have seen, we have many advantages if we buy and use an external WiFi card for our PC or laptop, ideal for achieving the best possible wireless performance.
