Home > Consumer Reviews > D-Link DWA-552 Xtreme N Wireless PCI Adapter

Hello all, thanks for taking the time to read this.

It took me a long time to really get a good handle on this cards performance and I have had it now for about 3 months. While the router that accompanies this adapter is the best wireless router I have ever used, I have found this PCI adapter to be just okay.

While it does it's job pretty well, it absolutely did not impress me as an "Extreme-N" PCI adapter. Let me say a little about my setup. I have the DLink Extreme N router upstairs and the PC that has this adapter in it sits on the floor and is almost directly across the house but downstairs (proably around 40-50 feet away and through about 4 walls at about -30 degrees). Windows thinks that it has a 300Mbps connection, but the included DLink software drivers can calculate the actual connection speed and it seems to fluctuate from anywhere from 2mbps and 108mbps (usually is around 32Mbps). The average throughput I usually get is around 60Mbps (which is around 7-8 megabytes a second...since you divide Mbps (Megabits) by 8bits to get Megabytes). If you dont know about the extreme-n router, I have a review on that too, but quickly its a gigabit router so it handle 1000Mbps (125 megabytes/sec) if you are using a wire, so there is no bottleneck within the router. I usually see around a 60% connection on the N network whereas my Centrino laptop in the same position gets around an 80% connection off of the "G" network that the router also transmits.

Although I am a little annoyed at the connection and throughput speeds, I am most annoyed at the fact that at the time of this review (5/2007) this PCI adapter is COMPLETELY and UTTERLY useless for Windows Vista. My Vista kept crashing (im talking a HARD crash...complete lockup of the computer, hard reset needed, after only 5-10 minutes past the boot-up process...consistently), and I tried to figure out why. I spoke to MS Customer service thinking that since Vista was so new, that there was a problem on their end. Together we figured out that it was this card that kept crashing the computer. After we disabled and removed the card from the system, it stopped crashing (I even tried to make it crash, but it was rock solid). The drivers I used were specifically labled Beta Vista Drivers, so until the drivers are out of the Beta phase, I wouldn't trust them. Since my house isnt yet wired for ethernet, and putting the wireless modem in that room would make my wireless network quite useless, I have a $250 piece of software (vista) just sitting on my shelf.

Anyways, if you are just using Windows XP, this should work out fine, not spectactular, not horrible...still better than the "G" networks (I will WAY outperform them if you are not as far from the router as I am) But not as spectacular as I hoped (Based on how spectacular the 655 router is).

With Windows XP, I did not experience any of the problems the other two reviewers mentioned. Have not tried with Vista (and probably never will until Mister Softee ends support on XP.) I recommend this card and the supporting router (dlink DIR-655) based on my own success with both. I did however upgrade the firmware on the DIR-655 after having difficulties.) This card replaced a dinosaur Linksys Wireless G card that had a broom handle sized antenna and the worst reception.

I got mine at a local Best Buy for about $60 8 months ago, and ever since its been nothing short of awesome. I dont know what everyone else's problem with this is, i find it to work very very well. Its very fast, and it worked on both XP and my Vista Ultimate 64 bit. You just need the drivers from the site to get the 64 bit vista version. It works with very far range. love this thing.

Replacing the g standard pci adapter in my wife's desktop computer with this n standard adapter increased the speed of transmissions between her computer and the D-Link DIR-655 wireless router from 54 mbps to 300 mbps. Her system is Windows XP and mine is Windows Vista. Now her browsing the Internet is almost as speedy as mine, which is connected to a cable modem through the DIR-655. An excellent buy.

I've installed this product on two Win XP machines and it works fine. It also works fine in a dual core Intel-based HP Pavillion running Vista Home Premium. However, it is incompatible with my AMD-based HP Pavillion (a6030n, dual core 4800+) running Vista Home Premium and the Microsoft certified D-Link driver version 1.3. I've tried two different DWA 552s in two different HP Pavillion a6030n computers with the same repeatable result: total lockup requiring hard reboot. After the DWA 552 is uninstalled, the PC returns to normal operation.