Rosewill RNX-N300UB WiFi Adapter Review: Keep on Streaming

Test System and Benchmarking

Installation is very much painless. Just plug in the device and run the installer on the CD. If you get lost in the installation, you can refer to the Quick Installation Guide as I found it to be useful. The RNX-N300UB is a USB 2.0 based device and should be plugged into USB 2.0 or 3.0. When you do install the Rosewill Wireless Adapter Utility you get access to a number of features that could be beneficial. We have reviewed Rosewill WiFi Products in the past and they all use the same utility. It is also worth to mention that there is no versions or build numbers on the utility.

The signal strength on idle was pretty good 98-99%. Distance to the router was about 30 feet and I was going through a couple of walls. I have also noticed that in the idle state the rate was around 14 Mbps. Once performed simple speed tests, rate went up to 144 Mbps and the signal strength stayed around 80%.

My router is a dual band router which can serve on 2.4 and 5 GHz networks. With RNX-N300UB I could only see the 2.4 GHz network (since its that’s all this adapter supports) (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 RNX-N300UB.

First test was to see what we can get from maximum available Internet Connection. My connection to the net is about 130 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up. With 2.4GHz connection my download speed was roughly 45 Mbps. Since my upload is capped to about 15Mbps all we got here is about 12 Mbps.

Transmitter

My next test was with use of NetStress Network Benchmarking Tool. First test here was to see how well does the transmitter work with just a single stream and how it would perform. Average speed here was about 31 Mbps (+/- 11 Mbps).

Adding 3 more transmitting streams in to the picture gave me about 7 Mbps per stream. I am not overly impressed with the performance here however its still better than RNX-N150NUB.

Receiver

While testing the receiver the performance under with single stream actually went up to 47 Mbps (+/- 10Mbps) from 31 Mbps.

With all four streams running the average speeds per stream were around 11.5 Mbps which is higher than 7 Mbps on Transmitter.