Rosewill RNX-AC1200UB WiFi Adapter Review: Balance of Price vs Performance

Installing the Rosewill AC1200UB was relatively easy. All you have to do is plug it in to your USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 port. I advise to use USB 3.0 for faster throughput. Installing drivers was a little bit of a challenge. Installing devices in Windows usually take a minute or two. Sometimes Windows has a suitable driver for the device and installs it itself. This not happened for AC1200UB. In fact when looking and installing drivers from the CD, Windows complained about not trusting drivers for this device. None of this was mentioned in the manual.

After few minutes fiddling with the drivers, I have successfully installed all the required drivers and WiFi Utility. Following are the screens from the WiFi Utility. Sorry I had to erase my MAC address :) The Signal strength was very good. I was approximately 30 feet a way from the WiFi Router and haven’t seen signal drop less than 70%.

As you can see here I am running WiFi on two modes 2.4 and 5GHz. (Our SSID is “Network Not Found”). To remember networks I can use Profile tab to add or remove any potential networks I want to connect to automatically.

There are couple of options in Advanced section that were interesting. One of them was SoftAP mode. “SoftAP is an abbreviated term for “software enabled access point.” This is software enabling a computer which hasn’t been specifically made to be a router into a wireless access point. It is often used interchangeably with the term “virtual router”.-Wikipedia. So in short you can set up an access point with AC1200UB.

First test was to see what we can get from poorly maximum available Internet Connection. With 2.4GHz connection my download speed was roughly 31Mbps. Since my upload is capped to about 10Mbps all we got here is about 12 Mbps. Doing speed test with 5GHz data rate I have gotten roughly 122Mbps to the Internet. Not to shabby but expected if you ask me.

To get more data I turned to JPerf 2.0.2. All following tests were done in 5GHz data mode. First test was to set up a single stream of data and see what we can get from it. In 25 seconds window I have pushed 210 MBytes to the server with averaged speed of 70.3 Mbits/sec. That is roughly 9MB/sec.

Next test was to look at multi stream scenario with four streams. In 25 seconds I have transferred 317 MBytes with combined speed of 106Mbits/sec which is roughly 13MB/sec.