Power Consumption, USB3 and Wired performance

Power Consumption

Power consumption among others. It's a hot topic these days and, well, we measure using a 10M distance setup, meaning we test with an active WIFI link (the throughput test). We measure this at the wall socket side with the help of a power monitor which can measure to a tenth of a Watt accuracy. This device measures in-between the wall socket and router. 

Above, power consumption, while we transmit from the laptop to a client-side PC. Wireless is obviously one of the more power consuming features to use. In IDLE the router uses, give or take, 10 Watts continuously and over 8.5 Watts with RGB LEDs off.

At 23 cents per kWh, this adds roughly 20 bucks per year on your power bill. 

USB 3.1 Performance

With the help of USB 3.1 you get fast storage on the router. Since the router allows you to share the files on external storage, the router basically functions as a NAS. Handy for UPnP needs and such. So we figured it would be nice to observe how fast USB 3.1 is on these routers:

The performance is pretty good. The test involves nothing other than copying from and to the USB device. We coupled with a portable USB drive connected to its fastest available USB 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.2 port.

A LAN-to-LAN network test reveals closer to full Gigabit performance over the ethernet jacks. Few routers these days have an issue here and this product performs as expected. We also included switch results of 2.5, 5 and 10 GigE to so show you where we are headed in the future.