In a world increasingly dominated by mobile devices it's easy to forget that many people, particularly in business environments, are still using desktop PCs.
Desktops of course tend not to come with built-in Wi-Fi which means adding a PCIe card or a USB wireless adaptor. With the KT9001, what Inateck has produced is a PCIe card that's a clever mash up of wireless adaptor and three port USB 3.0 hub.
The three USB ports offer transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps and have three-layer power management so you shouldn't need an extra port to provide power for devices like external hard drives. This part of the card uses a Fresco Logic chip.
The other side of its capability is an 802.11 AC protocol, dual-band wireless network card, using a Realtek chip supporting both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks. It comes with two antennas allowing it to select the most suitable wireless network automatically should you have a dual-band router or access point. Speeds of up to 300Mbps and 867Mbps are available provided your network supports it.
Everything you need is in the box, Inateck even provides a screw to fix the card into its slot. The supplied driver CD supports versions of Windows from XP up to 8.1 -- but more on that in a second. You need to run two separate driver installs, one for the Wi-Fi and one for the USB ports. A Realtek Wireless LAN Utility program is provided too although this wouldn't install on my Windows 8.1 64-bit system. That's not a huge issue as the card works with the in-built Windows network management tools. The drivers were more of a problem and I had to download a newer Realtek driver than the one provided in order to get reliable operation.
The one slight drawback is that you end up with the USB 3.0 ports on the back of the PC where they're not exactly convenient for plugging in things like external drives that will benefit most from the extra speed. It's worth investing in an extension cable or two to make them easier to use.
That and software issues aside the card works well, if you want to update a desktop machine to give it wireless and USB 3.0 capability then there's nothing else on the market that will do both jobs with just one card.
The KT9001 costs $39.99 on Amazon, or £41.99 in the UK. You can find the full technical spec on the Inateck website.