Home networking gear has been making some leaps in speed and sophistication since its introduction. These leaps have made wireless in the home more usable and configurable. Much of the work on this side of the product (making things easier to configure and use) has been behind the scenes, but this work has pushed wireless technology further into our homes. Now the big ticket item is the new 802.11ac wireless standard. However there is still a huge market for 802.11n wireless products with dual concurrent bands (2.4GHz and 5GHz). Right now these wireless products are what you are going to see in the market and what consumers are interested in simply because of their prevalence. So with that in mind we are taking about an 802.11n wireless router from Asus, the RT-N66U Dark Knight Wireless router.
Performance -For our performance testing with the RT-N66U we used a TRENDNet TEW-805UB along with our usual suspects (the built in Intel NIC etc). Our tests were ran on both bands independently and also with systems running on both bands at once. We used the full n spec with WPA2 personal (AES) encryption to keep things safe. Our client systems connected in talked to a server connected to one of the Gbe wired ports. We also did some real world testing using systems that were connected wirelessly.The RT-N66U is not exactly the top performer here, but it does stand out in a couple of areas. One of these we were actually surprised with. Normally the built-in Intel wireless card is not the fastest in the lab and more often than not has pretty big issues outside 50 ft. here we saw the RT-N66U do much better than the others with this card. Over all the performance was solid and it would not disappoint you at all.Reception - The reception in the Asus RT-N66U was good with an unobstructed range or around 150 Ft. and an obstructed range of around 75 Ft. We were able to get connected farther than that, but the performance was terrible so we would not consider that effective range. Still this range is good enough for most homes unless you have some serious walls between you and the RT-N66U.
Link Speed -As you might imagine the Link Speed changed quite a bit based on the range and also the conditions. The max link speed we recorded was 375Mbps which is still good although it would have been nice to see the full 450Mbps like advertised on the box.
Real World Traffic - Now this is what you really want to know about. How well did the RT-N66U perform when we put it under some real world tests? Well we started things off with three wireless systems connecting to YouTube and running the same video at once over the 5Ghz channel. The systems were our Samsung Series 7 Chronos laptop, a NETGEAR NeoTV Max and a NETGEAR NetTV Prime. Our YouTube experience was stutter free across all three machines.
Next up was Netflix where we also had no issues running regular content and only a minor problem buffering content at the beginning. We were more than a little surprised.
Lastly (for video anyway) we streamed movies from our Synology DS1513+ to the same three devices to see how well things went. Here we saw a similar experience to Netflix with a small load time, but otherwise clean streaming.
The RT-N66U had no issues with connecting to the internet or browsing for normal content and file transfers were what you would expect from an 802.11n wireless router. Overall the performance we saw from the RT-N66U is very good, but is it priced right? That is up next.
