Home Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N cards land in Alienware laptops
News

Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N cards land in Alienware laptops

Cyril Kowaliski
Disclosure
Disclosure
In our content, we occasionally include affiliate links. Should you click on these links, we may earn a commission, though this incurs no additional cost to you. Your use of this website signifies your acceptance of our terms and conditions as well as our privacy policy.

We don’t hear Bigfoot’s name all that often these days, but the company is still out there scoring juicy design wins with PC vendors. This time, its Killer Wireless-N 1103 adapter has landed inside of Dell’s Alienware gaming laptops. We’re not talking about a single flagship notebook model, either; Dell offers the card as an option across its mobile gaming lineup, from the diminutive M11x to the jumbo-sized M18x.

The Wireless-N 1103 came out in March and looks like a rather innocuous Mini-PCIe card. However, Bigfoot’s trademark latency-reducing mojo is part of the menu—the firm claims “up to five times lower latency than competitive products”—and so are traffic-shaping and traffic monitoring features. Oh, and the card can purportedly hit transfer speeds of up to 450Mbps over 802.11n.

From what I can tell, Dell charges either $30 or $80 extra for the Wireless-N 1103, depending on whether the system comes configured with Intel’s Advanced N + WiMAX 6250 adapter by default or not. That Intel adapter is a $50 upgrade over the default Dell 802.11n Wi-Fi card, so springing for the Bigfoot solution requires no great leap.

If I were a notebook gamer, I’d probably be fine plugging in an Ethernet cable to reduce my ping in online games. That said, substituting a cheap 802.11n adapter for a Wireless-N 1103 on a high-end gaming notebook seems awfully sensible. Network cards for gaming desktops can be a tough sell in a world where every bargain-basement motherboard has at least one Gigabit Ethernet port out of the box. Notebooks haven’t yet succumbed to that kind of integration with Wi-Fi, though, and they continue to require discrete adapter cards.

Latest News

YouTube Launches New Tool To Help Label AI-generated Content
News

YouTube Launches A New Tool To Help Creators Label AI-generated Content

Ripple Dumps 240 Million XRP Tokens Amid 17% Price Decline
Crypto News

Ripple Dumps 240 Million XRP Tokens Amid 17% Price Decline

Popular crypto payment platform Ripple has released 240 million XRP tokens in its latest escrow unlock for March. This comes at a time when XRP’s price has declined significantly. Data from...

Crypto Expert Draws A Links Between Shiba Inu And Ethereum
Crypto News

Crypto Expert Draws Link Between Shiba Inu And Ethereum

The founders of the second-largest meme coin, Shiba Inu, have been a mystery. However, many people within the crypto industry have made some probable suggestions regarding the coin’s fundamentals. Del...

The Lucrative FTX Bankruptcy Trade and Ongoing Legal Battle
Crypto News

The Lucrative FTX Bankruptcy Trade and Ongoing Legal Battle

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Set to Enter “Danger Zone” – Time to Back-Off or Bag More Coins?
Crypto News

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Set to Enter “Danger Zone” – Time to Back-Off or Bag More Coins?

SNB to Kick Off Rate Cut Cycle Sooner Than Expected
News

SNB to Kick-Start Rate Cut Cycle Sooner Than Expected

Top Crypto Gainers on 18 March – AVAX and RNDR
Crypto News

Top Crypto Gainers on 18 March – AVAX and RNDR