Better than a 50-foot HDMI cable

Better than a 50-foot HDMI cable Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Dell Laptop Battery

That said, it dawned on me that my setup may be a little too perfect. My PC is running a CPU with a compatible Intel hardware encoder, with two NVIDIA GTX graphics cards running in SLI on top of that. Worse (or rather, better) still, both my gaming setup and the Steam Link were wired directly into an ASUS RT-N66U router. Of course it was working -- my house is the ideal showroom testbed for Steam's In-Home Streaming service. I decided to try and make things a little more fair. What if my router wasn't so close to both my television and my gaming rig? I'd have to use WiFi. So I did. I noticed an immediate difference.

Removing the Link from my physical network and connecting over 2.4GHz with battery like dell Latitude D600 battery, dell Latitude D610 battery, dell Latitude D620 battery, Dell Latitude D630 Battery, dell Latitude D820 battery, dell Latitude D830 battery, dell Latitude D800 battery, dell Latitude D810 battery, Dell Inspiron 1546 Battery, Dell Inspiron E1501 Battery, Dell Inspiron E1505 Battery, Dell Inspiron 1525 BatteryWiFi didn't seem to change the frame rate of Steam's video feed, but it had a definite effect on audio and visual quality. It was still a playable experience, but every now and then the game's audio would stutter, or the stream would hang for a brief moment. The graphics also seemed to suffer a little color fidelity, like a faded wash of video artifacting was always threatening to pop up. Upgrading to my router's 5GHz connection helped a little, but the experience still wasn't on par with what I saw over Ethernet. It wasn't bad, per se -- it just wasn't as good.

I ran a few additional tests -- attempting to stream from one of my Windows-based media tablets and an old ThinkPad -- and confirmed the glaringly obvious: Steam in-home stream quality is heavily reliant on the capabilities of your home network and your host computer.

When Steam In-Home Streaming works (and it works perfectly on my network), playing games over the Steam Link is a lot like playing games on Alienware's Steam Machine or in the desktop app's Big Picture mode. Most of the time, it just works... but not all the time. Once or twice, my PC gave me an error that either broke the experience, or simply wasn't present when I performed the same task on a SteamOS-based PC. Early on in my testing, for instance, I encountered a pop-up window asking for administrator privileges, which somehow disabled my Steam Controller's ability to manipulate the mouse cursor, forcing me to walk to my desk to dismiss the window. It only happened once, but it happened. I guess not even the Link and Steam Controller can overcome the foibles of gaming on Windows.

I also had some inconsistent control issues; the native Steam Controller support Valve baked into Portal 2 refused to work on my Windows PC for some reason, despite working flawlessly on Alienware's SteamOS console. Non-Steam games were happy to stream through to the Link if I added them to my Steam game library, but I could never get the dual-touchpad controller to play nice with these titles.