Linksys ac-600 driver download

Pros: Setup was extremely easy -- plug it in and windows 7 found it right away and installed the drivers. There is a disc included in the box, and I upgraded the drivers from linksys' web page "just because", but I did speed testing beforehand using a GHz MIMO network and found absolutely no speed difference vs. the stock drivers. Ran some throughput tests on this device and was happy with its results. First test was a local LAN filesystem throughput test, and wired gig could write at Mbps and read at Mbps, and via the AC adapter was able to write at Mbps and read at Mbps. Those are sustained throughput numbers over five minutes and include all the losses associated with using a filesystem with SMB3, so while not coming anywhere close to wired gigE they were still quite good. The test I expected to faceplant was the VOIP jitter test. Here I simulated 50 simultaneous VOIP calls for one minute. Usually on a wireless network this is enough data that the jitter will be all over the place. Happily, the jitter over my MIMO network was an average of ms, while the wired ethernet had jitter of ms. That's far far below the threshold where it'll matter for VOIP or for gaming, and I was very happy to see the network card performing so well so consistently!

Cons: Size of unit is a bit of a wide wedge; if you have USB ports close to each other horizontally or stacked vertically on top of each other (such as on a laptop), you're going to have a bad time and you'll lose access to one of those ports. You can fix that with a 3" USB extender cable, but who wants to do that? You must plug this into a USB3 port to get anywhere near its maximum speed. That should be obvious, but it's worth mentioning. It still functions in a USB2 port, but at reduced maximum throughput. The largest complaint I had with the unit (and this happened both with windows 7's built in drivers and linksys' drivers), if my desktop PC went into a deep sleep one out of every four times or so the adapter would NOT come back up when resuming from sleep. It was hard to pin down exactly what was failing, because it didn't fail every time the computer went into S3 sleep, only maybe 25% of the time. If I would pull the adapter out and plug it back in then it'd fire right back up, but that shouldn't be necessary; it should come back from deep sleep EVERY time. (I didn't think to try disabling and re-enabling the adapter when that happens, I'll have to try it and see what happens.)

Overall Review: Very good throughput and excellent jitter make this a great option for those with a MIMO network and can't do wired. While the throughput still can't touch wired gig, the reliability is top notch.