In several ways, Netgear is almost identical to Linksys in our minds: good quality networking gear that tends to step a step or two behind the bleeding edge. A few products bomb, but most are reliable and more than sufficient. The company does a great job with addressing mainstream networking needs, as well as urging the mainstream into slightly new directions.
The WRM2000v2 ($69.82) falls into the former category. This is a straight up, no frills 11n router. The four LAN ports are 10/100, and there’s no USB port. The two biggest call-outs Netgear seems to have for this unit are its WPS button (dubbed “Push ‘N’ Connect”) and its green features. However, it’s telling that the two green features seem to be comprised of the packaging being manufactured with at least 80% recycled materials and the fact that the router features a “convenient power on/off switch to conserve energy.” OK, we like Netgear, but we question any marketing team that promotes a power switch as a “green” feature. This does not bode well for our benchmarking.
We had higher hopes for the WNDR3700 ($159.99), which on paper appears to give Linksys’s dual-band powerhouse a run for its money. This router is also touted for its green features, but we tend to appreciate D-Link’s ability to detect Ethernet cable length and modify signal power accordingly more than Netgear’s promotion of wireless signal strength adjustment as a power-saving feature. Of course, it is saving power, but this little option setting has been promoted for years as a security feature long before eco-friendliness came back into vogue.
Enough semantics. The WNDR3700 is a simultaneous dual-band router with eight antennas and a 32-bit, 680 MHz processor for enabling gobs of concurrent sessions. You can have four SSIDs, perform remote router management from across the Internet, stream media to ReadyDLNA devices, and keep an eye on recent WAN traffic volume. QoS tools include a couple of pull-down menus with common applications for establishing new QoS rules. You can also mandate QoS prioritization for a given LAN port or MAC address, which are nifty extras. And of course, there’s a USB port for creating network storage and shares, and Netgear throws in its ReadyShare applet for local volume mapping.
Because of the restrictions in our test setup, we had to pair both of these Netgear routers with Netgear’s own WNDA3100 USB adapter. To make a long story short, this was disastrous, we went through three of these adapters before finding one that yielded even moderately decent results. As soon as we switched to our notebook’s internal 11n adapter, performance bounded forward. Unfortunately, we have to stick with our same-brand results. The WNDA3700 is a good router. Just be sure to use it with someone else’s client adapter.
- 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.