To make our point about the importance of consistent throughput, we used a little tool called Bandwidth Monitor to grab a few seconds of activity from several file transfer tests. Check out these two comparisons, one showing a transfer from the router (red bars) and the other to the router (green bars).
It’s pretty obvious what type of throughput you want. The Belkin N1 Vision shows peak throughput very near to that of the Netgear WNDR3700, only trailing by 10 or 12 percent. But whereas Netgear looks very smooth and solid (save for that one fleeting drop-out), Belkin’s signal is a train wreck. We’d hardly trust that signal with VoIP, never mind video. The TP-Link signal is even worse than Belkin’s. In fact, we include these TP-Link and Linksys graphs simply to illustrate the worst and best of the bunch.
Without question, the Linksys WRT610N emerges as the obvious winner of this roundup, and there’s no reason to think that the carbon copy E3000 won’t follow suit. As a result, the WRT610N wins our rare and coveted Recommended Buy award. In second place, we’d likely pick the Ruckus 7811 strictly on a performance basis, but we can’t ignore the fact that Ruckus now has a serious problem. The company has positioned its access point and client as a video solution for demanding video consumers. Linksys now delivers equal or better performance without the beamforming, and Linksys packages this performance in a router with tons of additional functionality. Ruckus merely has an access point.
Could Netgear give Linksys a run for its money? With a different client adapter, we suspect so. Some of our data sure hints at it. As a mid-range compromise, ZyXEL has a lot of potential, although the company really needs a new model with more consumer focus offering the same performance at the same price.
Speaking of price, D-Link needs a major reassessment. Being able to insert a drive is nifty, but we’d rather see more convenience and scalability from a USB 3.0 or eSATA port or two. We’re totally unconvinced by the LCD display as being anything more than unnecessary and costly eye candy. We know D-Link can make better gear than this. Ditto that for TRENDnet, which doesn’t suffer from D-Link’s price-to-performance disparity with the TEW-671BR, but the router clearly needed a push to help it along...a third antenna, perhaps. And while TRENDnet’s travel router can only putter along with the most basic performance, we still like it for its mobility.
Finally, if you’re strapped for cash, the Asus RT-N13U arrives as a welcome and pleasant surprise from a field that left us feeling mostly disappointed in the low-end.
- Router Reignition
- Asus RT-N13U And RT-N16
- Belkin N150 And N1 Vision
- D-Link DIR-685
- Linksys WRT610N
- Netgear WRN2000v2 And WNDR3700
- Ruckus Wireless 7811
- TP-Link WR741ND
- TRENDnet TEW-654TR And TEW-671BR
- ZyXEL X550N
- How We Tested
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Many Files
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Single File
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Throughput
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Response Time
- Benchmark Results: Zap TCP
- Benchmark Results: Zap UDP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest TCP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest UDP
- Conclusion



Good point.
Which firmware was installed on it?
I have one (V1), but am very unhappy about the signal range! I have it replaced with a WNDR3700 and have now a twice as strong signal as before!
Bit the bullet with the $$ and opted for the Linksys and am very pleased.
pato, my WRT600N was the v1 variant. I forget the release version of the firmware, but it was the latest version, as Linksys has not released any updates for it in roughly a year (I've had the router since a few months after it was first released). I liked it due to the dual radios, however, but it would drop wireless clients randomly (which was aggravating and required me to reset the router about once every other month) and it would not retain my port forwarding settings for my home server. And I agree with you, signal range was marginal with that router.
2) Should have tested N + G concurrency on 2.4GHz as well as N only on 2.4 + 5GHz concurrency (for devices that had dual radio). This data is important for most people who will run a Wireless N device or two, but likely also have a few smart phones or a game console that only supports 2.4GHz... I know the Airport Extreme currently has a bug making this dog slow, do some of the others?
3) onyl 2 concurrent devices? how about 5 or 6? I regularly have 7 or 8. I notice performance drops off consistently just based on the number of connected devices, even if only one is "in use" actively downloading, and want to know if some routers hold out better with that.
4) no feature comparison chart?
How much did you guys test the shareport function? (Not much from what it looks like). The shareport function hooked up to an external hard drive only works if you are transferring a file or two using windows. It totally fails when you try to us it with a 3rd party backup program (such as acrea). I personally haven't tried connecting a printer to shareport. I also couldn't get it to work using eraser (a disk erasing utility. I concluded that it just doesn't work with third party apps. So far, none of the driver, firmware or shareport software updates have fixed this problem.
D-link does have a nice forum on their site where people can post their problems. For fixable problems, other users will helpfully solve your problems. For unsolvable problems (shareport being one of them) the user complaints just keep piling up. Rarely do d-link's own tech support grace the forums. Apparently, D-link is currently collecting all of the shareport grips and cataloging them. Ostensibly, this will result in a fix at some point in the future. Still waiting.