Power Consumption and Wired performance

Power Consumption

For the final series of tests, we examine, among other things, power consumption. It's a popular topic right now, with pricing in the EU soaring towards 40 cents per KWh. We measure utilizing a 10M distance setting, which means we test with an active WIFI connection (the throughput test). This is measured at the wall outlet with the aid of a power monitor that is accurate to a tenth of a Watt. This device measures the wall outlet and the router.

The graph above shows the power the router uses when sending data from a laptop to a client PC. Wireless features tend to use more energy than others. When the router is not in use, it uses about 10 watts of power. At an electricity rate of 40 cents per kWh, the router would use about 35-40 dollars/euro of energy per year.

A test that checks the performance of a LAN-to-LAN network shows that this router performs well when using the Ethernet jacks. The one single 2.5 GigE port, which is almost 300 MB/sec. However, since it has only one port, it's not possible to connect multiple devices. The 2.5 GigE port is useful for super-fast WAN connections.