Power Consumption, USB3 and Wired performance

Power Consumption

For the final series of tests, we look at power consumption among others. It's a hot topic these days and well, we measure in a 10M distance setup. We measure this at wall socket side with the help of a power monitor which can measure in a tenth of a Watt precise. This device measures in-between the wall socket and router. 

Above power consumption, while we transmit from the laptop towards 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. With active WIFI roughly 12~13 Watts for the router. We find that to be a quite a lot. At 21 cents per kWh thus roughly 24 bucks per year on power. 

USB3 Performance

With the help of USB 3.0 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 3.0 is on these routers:

The performance is pretty good. The test involves nothing other than copying from and towards the USB device. When coupled with a portable USB drive connected to its USB 3.0 port, the router shows a sustained WRITE speed of ~50 MB/s and it reached just over 84 MB/sec READ performance.

A LAN-to-LAN network test reveals closer to full Gigabit performance over the ethernet jacks. Few routers these days have an issue here.