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D-Link
has a reputation for building quality networking
components and the DWL-920 USB Wireless Network is
no different.
This kit maintains a very small footprint but
yields excellent features and flexibility.
Transmitting and receiving at a frequency in
excess of 2GHz will ensure that your wireless
network will not interfere with, nor be interfered
by any other electronic components in the area.
D-Link has taken the time to make a product
that is both simple in design yet robust in it's
features.
When it comes to quality and design, the
DWL-920 USB Wireless Network kit stands out from the
rest.
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| Installation
and Drivers |
| It
Doesn't Get any Easier... |
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When
it comes to the installation of the DWL-920 USB
Wireless Network, the term ?Idiot Proof? comes
to mind.
Along with comprehensive and informative user
manuals, individual Quick Install Guides are
included for each version of Microsoft windows.
Following the procedures outlined in the
Quick Install Guide for our Windows Millennium test
system, the installation went perfectly.
Once the driver was installed and the system
rebooted, we had to make a few adjustments in
Network Neighborhood and we were on our way.
Thanks
to one of the best Documentation packages we?ve
seen, there is a good chance that you?ll find
answers for just about any question that you may
have when you install this kit. D-Link has even included a basic networking lesson in the
manual to help people with little networking
knowledge understand how the system works.
They have truly taken that ?extra step?
to insure all buyer find the information they need.
Not
only does the DWL-920 cover all of the bases when it
comes to installation, it?s handles security
issues effectively as well.
For the user who has strong security
concerns, the DWL-920 provides Automatic Dynamic Key
Allocation and
40-bit WEP encryption to ensure that your data is
secure. There
is also an optional 128 Bit WEP encryption available
too.
Lets
move on and see how this kit stood up against our
trusty hard-wired network shall we?
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| Test
System |
| The
baseline for performance |
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Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS
Pentium III 933EB
Tyan S1854 (Via 133A) Motherboard
GeForce 2 Ultra AGP Card w/64MB of DDR SDRAM
256MB of Mushkin Rev. 2 PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM
IBM 15Gig 7200-RPM ATA100 Hard Drive
Pioneer 16max DVD-ROM
Windows ME
DirectX 8.0
nVidia
reference drivers (Detonator 3 6.50)
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| Performance |
| Real-World
Stuff... |
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For
our testing, we performed several routine tasks with
both the DWL-920 and our wired test network,
consisting of a Linksys EtherFast 10/100 Auto
Sensing Hub and two Linksys LNE100TX Fast Ethernet
Adapters. We
set the Linksys adapter to 10BaseT for all tests
performed. The
DWL-920 was tested in both AdHoc mode
(peer-to-peer), which doesn?t utilize the Access
point, and Infra Structure mode which uses the
Wireless Access Point to broadcast data across the
network.
We
started out by playing an MP3, AVI, and MPEG file
across the network.
The MP3 quality was good across all
configurations although a little skip could be heard
in the beginning of each song with the DWL-920 in
infrastructure mode.
We
then played an AVI & MPEG file across each
network configuration. We found that the
quality was good on the wired setup but choppy
with the DWL-920 in AdHoc mode and not playable at
all in infrastructure mode.
We
then followed up the test by installing Photoshop
from a shared CD-ROM, Printing to a network printer
and playing a round of Quake III Arena.
All of which performed flawlessly. It
seems like the combination of wireless transmitters
/ receivers and USB were not meant for sustained
high-bandwidth use.
So
with those rounds behind us, we have a pretty good
idea how the DWL-920 compares to the wired setup,
but it?s difficult to come up with solid number to
demonstrate. So
we decided to transfer several files across the
network and time the transfer of each, the first
file being 2 MB, followed by a 5 MB and 40 MB file.
The chart below lists the results in Minutes:
Seconds
The
numbers speak for them selves.
As far as our tests have gone, the DWL-920
doesn?t compare to the old fashioned way.
We thought that that maybe the discrepancy
was a result of us running LinkSys cards that were
set from 100Mbs to 10 Mbs.
We confirmed with the Sandra 2001 Network
Benchmark that we were in fact transmitting at 10
Mbps.
Needless to say, the differences were
significant.
After
running the D-Link DWL-920 USB Wireless Network
through a series of tests, we've found that even
though the transmission rate is a bit slower than
traditional 10MBps setups, the DWL-920 is still a
good product.
For the commercial user who needs to share
files and printers and access applications across a
LAN, the DWL-920 should perform well. This also
would apply to the home user who needs simple
sharing capabilities, as long as they don't need to
play bandwidth hogging files like audio and video
formats across the network.
Ultimately it will depend on how important it
is for the user to have a wireless network...there
are some situation where you simply cannot run a
wire. The M.S.R.P. for the entire kit is $599
(street price will surely be lower), although the
homeowner could knock it down a couple hundred bucks
by buying two Network Adapters individually and
configuring a peer-to-peer network.
If your rig is jam packed and there are no
free IRQ's available for a standard NIC and running
wires is out of the question, then the DWL-920 is a
fine solution.
If we were
rating on ease-of-use and coolness factor alone we'd
give the D-Link DWL-920 a 9, but because of it's
sub-par real world performance we give the
DWL-920 USB Wireless Network a HotHardware Heat
Meter Rating of...
Speak
your mind! Get in the H.H. Conference Room Right
NOW!
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