View Full Version : Do Atheros cards perform better than Prism 2.5 in B mode?
cal361
02-17-2004, 08:46 AM
I was just wondering if these cards perform any better than a Senao card? Are they easier on the CPU? Is the polling any faster? You get the idea.
Thanks in advance.
From what I hear, they perform quite a bit better than prism cards in b mode, but I haven't done any testing myself
lonnie
02-17-2004, 08:57 PM
The driver is dma based so they will perform far better, but the prismn2.5 is going to be more compatible with the mix of systems that people have.
If I was starting fresh I would use Atheros, but if it was going into an existing mix of users I would use prism2.5. The Senao 200 mW are nice cards.
I just did a test with a dwl-900ap in client mode to a netgear wg311(atheros 5212) card in AP mode. Had to set preamble to short on the dwl-900 to get them to link up, other than that it works great. I'm getting 680KB/s RX speed, and 547KB/s TX speed. That's about 150KB/s-200Kb/s more than I normally see with other 802.11b cards.
btw this was on a soekris 4521
Yes, Soekris systems will see a dramatic improvement in 802.11b performance due to DMA. As you found, the Atheros requires short preamble to connect (most clients support both long and short).
One thing to note is that legact 802.11 (2Mbps) clients are not supported.
Thanks!