Hardware Misc USB Dual Band Wireless N 5GHZ Vs Built In Slim/E WiFi Performance Benchmarks

[alexfree]

Long time ago I asked here and someone confirmed that you can in fact use the USB WiFi adapters meant for the phat consoles with the slim and E models that already have WiFi built in.

At first you may be asking, if a slim or E console already has WiFi, why would you do this? To “upgrade” to dual band and 5GHz connectivity of course.

I wanted to try this because:

* My router is basically on the other side of my apartment and my 360e is the furthest device from it in the bedroom. The 360E is “fine” in the living room right next to it but put any amount of distance or walls between it and the router and the WiFi performance drops severely…

* My apartment building has a “free” WiFi tier me and everyone else in the building is on, but the base speed/router isn’t great and the network is heavily congested.

So here’s the results. I used the Network Statistics option built into the stock dash multiple times until I got the best results since they can vary for both scenarios (no wireless N 5ghz dual band adapter and built in WiFi). I also turned off the console before plugging in the usb WiFi adapter (not sure if it matters or not).

Built in WiFi (Best)

Microsoft Wireless N Dual Band 5GHZ USB (Best)

Setup:

This is the one you want (with 2 antennas, not 1!):

The grey one with one antenna is the older 2.4GHZ model that is the same as what is already in a slim or E console.

Moving the antennas towards the router tremendously helped to get to these speeds as well

 

[TechnicolorNX]

How does this compare to wired Ethernet?

 

[alexfree]

How does this compare to wired Ethernet?

Great question. If I end up testing that I’ll post it here but my router can only be plugged into literally the worst area possible for anything, I even bought a 20 foot coax cable to try to get it to the center of the apartment closer to the bedroom. I just moved the 360 back into the bedroom so I really don’t want to go through all that again at the moment but for what it’s worth I literally remember when resident evil 9 released, on release night I took my Ps5 out of my bedroom into my home office and hooked up the Ethernet where my router is so the download would take less then an hour instead of multiple days. That’s how congested this area is with WiFi… even with modern devices. I might end up getting a 2nd 360 for the living room because I hate moving it and that would just be connected to Ethernet if I end up doing that. But obviously yea if you can Ethernet is the best.

Anyways with this new setup FTP is a lot more stable and faster and Netflix sure is a lot happier on the 360 too no more quality dips… I still think I’ll stick to copying my backups to a usb hdd though because the thought of waiting for 8GBs to go across this WiFi is not worth it when I can just copy paste copy in maybe 5 minutes (that’s why I have badupdate/abadavatar on a sata usb hdd). But for things like copying downloaded YouTube videos over via ftp to watch this is great