Best Wireless Router for a MAC... regardless or price

[Sevan]

Hi I have a Macbook, and I'm looking to get a very fast wireless router, with decent range...
I've read several reviews and it looks like the Netgear RangeMax 240 (WPNT834) is possibly the best on the market... But I am also considering the airport extreme (especially becasuse it has the usb port for wireless printing, which the netgear doesn't)...

So for a Mac, which is better the netgear rangemax 240 or the airport extreme?


I also read in another thread that in order to make the best of the airport extreme you need to have hardware with all 802.11n cards. How do I know if I have this?
(I have the black macbook:
Machine Model: MacBook2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Core: 2)
I don't know if that information helps tell if i have a 802.11n card (sorry not great with computer... But if that information doesn't tell me, where can i find out?


THANK YOU FOR YOUR INPUT.

 

[emaja]

Are you going to be sharing files with other computers on your network, or are you just getting the router to go wireless? If there will be no file sharing, your money will be wasted on any 802.11n router as even the slowest 802.11b routers are faster than most ISPs in the States.

If you are thinking about "n" for the extended range, go with a MIMO router like the Netgear WPN824 instead. It will give you most of the benefits of the added range of "n" but cost less than $80.

 

[volvoben]

I'm sure someone else is about to say this, but please remember that MAC actually means Media Access Control, not Mac, which is short for Macintosh, as you intended. Another similar faux pas on the board is using Imac instead of iMac or imac. It's not as important because it's not a homonym, it's just incorrect.

If price is no obstacle, just get the airport, it's made by apple, has good range and extras like NAS and print server capabilities. The only thing it lacks is a gigabit switch.

I believe all c2d MBs have the wireless n card, however the info you provided is not sufficient to show this, you'd just have to look deeper in the hardware profiler. You also need the $1.99 patch to allow use of the n capabilities (comes with the airport).

I use a wrt-54gl with dd-wrt to allow me more flexibility and stability (it's used as a bridge and I've never reset it once (a few power outages have done that for me however)) in over 2 years. I don't have any n-capable devices though, but if I did I think I'd still wait for the final draft near the end of the year so I don't get stuck with an alpha product or proprietary standard.