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[highzealot]

So I've been using a USB wireless adaptor for a few months under a year and now it appears to be suffering from heating issues which I've heard many USB wireless adaptors suffer from. I'm fairly sure it's the adaptor as under computers, including a laptop to the right of my desktop is having fine internet connection.

So what I'm looking for is a wireless network adaptor card that can work with PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4. My motherboard specifications also say the PCIEX4 slot conforms to PCI Express 2.0 standard though I'm not sure what that means exactly. I would prefer it to be under $50.00 Canadian and from while I would prefer it from NCIX, I think any store would be fine.

Motherboard: Gigabyte B75M-D3H mATX LGA1155 B75 DDR3 2PCI-E16 2PCI HDMI CrossFireX SATA3 USB3.0 Motherboard

I also have my graphics card in the PCIEX16 slot where there is 2 other unused PCI slots between the PCIEX16 and PCIEX4 encase size matters. Primary reason for wanting to use the PCIEX4 is so the future network card would be farther away from my graphic card's fan which is pointing towards to other PCI slots.

Other things which might matter but I'm not sure if they do:

Case: Fractal Design Core 1000 mATX
Power Supply: Seasonic SS-400ET 400W EPS12V 20/24PIN ATX Power Supply Active PFC
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 OC 1100MHZ 1GB 5.0GHZ GDDR5

[wierd]

.... Wireless ethernet cards in PCIe flavor are (to my knowledge) always 1x cards.  Wireless ethernet just isn't that fast, to need a 4x card.

according to Wikipedia, a PCIExpress card on one lane (1x) can transfer data at 200mb/sec. That's 1600mbit. Wireless N, the current "Fastest" wifi spec, only drives up to 600mbit. Even with an atrocious overhead, there is really no practical reason why such an interface card would ever saturate an entire PCIExpress lane. Even a gigabit wired ethernet card still would have 600mbit of breathing room before saturating the link.

This is in comparison to something like a very fast SATA controller, which can do several gigabits of signal rate, and which would reasonably need more than a 1x slot.

You CAN put a 1x card in a 4x slot. Just most of the slot will be vacant.

This is a nice Ralink based dual band PCIe card in the pricepoint you are looking for.  Most cards on the market will have the much less FOSS friendly Broadcomm based chipset, or the more commodity atheros chipsets, and probably wont be sexy dual band. (Can work at either 2.4ghz, or the 5ghz bands. Most are single band in the 2.4ghz spectrum, and just occupy more channels. If you have degraded network functionality from overcrowding on the spectrum, and have a dual band router, switching to the 5ghz band may fix many problems. Given that you can get a dual band card in the pricerange you specified, I would go ahead and get one. )

The reason I suggest a Ralink based card, is because if you should ever decide to use linux or some other alternative OS, the card will be supported out of the box, whereas the broadcomm and atheros offerings may have to need special kludges to get going.

[highzealot]

Your recommendation seems really nice but unfortunately I couldn't find one available from Canada and taxes from importing are my primary reasons for not wanting to ship it over.

However, I decided to see what other cards from Rosewill I can get in Canada and I think I found 3 options from newegg. Are those any good and which would be best for me? I'm leaning towards this one but I'm not sure as I don't understand all the stuff that's said in the details.

[wierd]

That's a realtek based chipset, which has mainline kernel support in linuxes using kernels newer than 2.6, (Which is basically all modern distros.) I dont see that it needs a binary firmware blob, like Broadcomm cards do, or special ndis wrappers, like some atheros cards do.

It gets a pretty solid 4.5 average rating just about everywhere I look for reviews.  Should be a good card. Sadly, it is NOT a dual band card, despite having dual antennas.

Of your results there, only one is dual band, but it is rather expensive.  You dont explicitly NEED dual band, it's just nice to have as an option, especially in crowded urban settings, like a highrise apartment building. (The shorter effective range of the 5ghz band, and greater attenuation (means it gets absorbed by more things, like walls) means your signal wont be leaving the apartment, and the neighbor's signal wont be jamming yours.  If you want to use your PDA in your back yard, and dont have a crowded spectrum, then the 2.4ghz spectrum is the way to go. Again, having options is nice, but take what you can most afford.)

[highzealot]

Alright, I've chosen the Rosewill RNX-N250PCe. Thanks for the help.