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 how much power the router uses when sending data from a laptop to a client PC. Wireless features tend to use more power than others. When the router is not in use, it uses about 10~11 watts of power. At an electricity rate of 40 cents per kWh, this means the router would use about 40 dollars/euro of power 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.