ASUS USB-AC68 AC1900 Dual-band USB 3.0 WiFi Adapter, Cradle included

I must say, I was very skeptical about this device, having had plenty of past mediocre experiences with other usb wifi adapters and seeing all the negative reviews about this one overheating, disconnecting, dying, or even being brought to its knees at one point by the Windows Creators Update. But this thing, has so far exceeded all expectations.Using the 5 Ghz band is where this adapter really shines. Being in a room in this house where some ungodly field of interference has plagued me for many years is no longer an issue with this device. The stability is just insane. Any pro gamer who plays first person shooters knows that it is not about the bandwidth of a connection that matters but the stability by which frames of data are consistently delivered. I have provided an image just to show how smooth the green curve for the download speed is (this is literally what a direct lan line connection looks like). Upload speeds are a bit choppy when increasing, but this is certainly nothing new with most modern devices. My ISP currently allows me up to 400 Mbits download speeds (upload is like 25 Mbits). I am also about 30 feet away from the router.Though this might not seem far, keep in mind that I am dealing with some crazy unknown wall of interference that hampers most wifi devices and am using a default ISP router (Sagecom) from Spectrum at the other end. My Samsung S8 on the 5ghz band can reach around 150 Mbits. This utility certainly has it considerably beat. So I am pretty happy with those results.Installation is very straight forward. All you have to do is simply plug it in and the default Windows 10 wifi driver takes over. The default driver appears to have been updated to support AC devices as I am getting up to 500-700 Mbits of data throughput with the limitations I am experiencing (this device should be able to push over 1 Gbit of throughput in most other situations from what I have witnessed).I have experimented with both the dated ASUS driver and Realtek driver to find that the default driver was the best option of the bunch. Neither the ASUS or the Realtek driver saw any real improvement in bandwidth or throughput. The Realtek driver in fact caused some problematic lag spikes upon attempting to uninstall and revert back to the original Windows driver. This was remedied by a netsh winsock reset.All in all, I am happy with this purchase. The amazing performance of the ASUS PCE-AC88 on another desktop is what led me to take a chance with this more expensive usb adapter. Was it worth it? So far yes, yes indeed. Let's just hope it doesn't run into any of the previously mentioned issues. Otherwise it will stay at 5 stars.

3/19/2020 - Product review update: I've had this product for 18 months now, still working fine, no issues at all.1/10/2019 - Product review update: I've had this product for several months now and am still very happy with it. Absolutely no issues, still getting very decent download/upload speeds and have made my wife happy with her computer again. Averaging 22-27MB's on the downloads and 19-25MB's on the uploads (which is 2 to 3 times better than my previous product) with a 100MB ISP service. Pings are averaging around 15-19ms. Note: this testing is with a speed test service not associated with my ISP provider. I may be wrong but my ISP provider's "speed test" always seems to bring back very high results which I don't think are "real world". My computer is about 50 feet from my router with several walls in between (standard wallboard/wood frame house). Hope this helps.Initial Review: Bought this item to replace a much older product that, at the time, seemed acceptable. However, when my Internet Service Provider "upped" the down service speed from 25MB to 50MB at no additional charge I found that I couldn't take advantage of it.I already have an ASUS router (recently purchased) so I decided to stay with the ASUS product line, especially after reading the favorable reviews for this product. After receiving the product, I installed the CD drivers and immediately updated them from the ASUS website (not sure if I just simply duplicated what I already had done but did it anyway). Plugged the ASUS unit in, navigated to my Wi-Fi page and found my router. Input the password and I was up and running.The speed is definitely faster than I had before, not sure if I'm getting all of the "bang" available but it certainly does what I need it to do. I'm sure that someone who knows how to do this better than myself could "fine tune" the installation.One minor issue with it was that it seemed to take a couple of tries for it to "remember" the link after I powered down the PC. I had to "reconnect" but it did eventually "remember" the link and now works fine. Not sure if this is an "idiot in front of the screen" error or something with Windows 10.Hope this helps any other "novice" looking to install this device.

I recently moved and had issues with my previous USB adapter being able to catch good connection in the new house layout so i was looking for a new adapter to work with my gaming and streaming (League, warframe, Among Us, etc. simple games)at first, i did as directed and downloaded the drivers straight from the WEBSITE since i dont have a CD reader in my pc. Was working great for a month or two; 60 ping in league, reliable connection, videos loaded faster. However recently, i had issues of broken connection and heavy ping spikes. i originally thought it was due to COVID and having everyone home and using the internet; but not only was i the only one using a computer, i was the only person awake in the house, meaning no one was even awake to use any devices extensively.After doing a quick swap out and connection test with my old adapter, i realized the new adapter was not working up to par. i looked around on these reveiws and noticed that the people who had no issues or little issues were those who connected the adapter out of the box without installing the drivers. so i did a few more connection tests between the two adapters for comparisons.the ASUS adapter was hitting between 8-60 Mbps for downloads prior to removing the drivers and 0.5mbps for uploads. After a clean driver removal and fresh computer restart; Downloads hit 90-120mbps download and 11-12mbps for uploads. so far its running smooth and i have been testing the connection with consistent results. hopefully it sticks because i do like this adapter quite a bit.