Airport Extreme Base Station Q's (need A's)

[btaussie]

Hi guys,

Two quick question, my previous wireless router is on its death bed and I'm going to pick up an AEBS but have the following questions that I hope can get answered:

- I have a Macbook Core Duo (not 2) which does not have the draft N card in it, is it possible to get an upgrade at the local Apple store to get a draft N wireless card put in for airport and if so how much will it set me back?

- Secondly I have an iMac with Core 2 Duo so it has draft N capabilities. Is it better in terms of speed performance to directly run an ethernet cable from my iMac to the AEBS or simply let the iMac connect via airport?

Your help in this matter is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[samh004]

- I have a Macbook Core Duo (not 2) which does not have the draft N card in it, is it possible to get an upgrade at the local Apple store to get a draft N wireless card put in for airport and if so how much will it set me back?

No, but you could probably "hack" it, then it wouldn't be under warranty though.

- Secondly I have an iMac with Core 2 Duo so it has draft N capabilities. Is it better in terms of speed performance to directly run an ethernet cable from my iMac to the AEBS or simply let the iMac connect via airport?.

It'll still be faster with a wire (gigabit speeds versus megabit speeds). Your looking at a difference of 130MB/s with 802.11n (iMac), 54MB/s with 802.11g (MacBook) and 1000MB/s wired.

However you'll only ever notice the differences transferring files between computers. Your internet will be slower than even your MacBook's wireless.

So if your connecting to the internet only through your iMac, you wont notice a difference between wireless and wired. If you transfer files between the two, unless you connect your MacBook wired too, you'll notice the slow down because of your MacBook, not your iMac (regardless of which you use).

 

[macleod199]

- I have a Macbook Core Duo (not 2) which does not have the draft N card in it, is it possible to get an upgrade at the local Apple store to get a draft N wireless card put in for airport and if so how much will it set me back?

- Secondly I have an iMac with Core 2 Duo so it has draft N capabilities. Is it better in terms of speed performance to directly run an ethernet cable from my iMac to the AEBS or simply let the iMac connect via airport?

The Apple Draft N card requires additional antennas, so no dice trying to hack a new card into the older model.

The thing with network performance is that there's two factors - transfer speed and latency. A wired connection will almost always have lower latency than a wireless connection, meaning that you may notice less lag when e.g. starting to load a new web site, or especially in network gaming.