It’s easy to become jaded when you review as much cutting-edge hardware as we do. We try not to be curmudgeons, but we do get grumpy when next-gen hardware fails to make a leap in performance—or worse, when it falls behind the gear it’s intended to supplant. So we’re happy to report that benchmarking Netgear’s new WNDR4500 left us grinning from ear to ear. This is the fastest router we’ve ever tested, and it’s packed with new features.
Belkin’s N750 DB offers a better-than-average feature set, but the router’s performance is a mixed bag. At most of our test stations, it delivered very good performance from its 5GHz radio but mediocre throughput from its 2.4GHz radio. Belkin arrives at the N750 model number by adding the 300Mb/s theoretical throughput on its 2.4GHz radio to the 450Mb/s theoretical throughput of its 5GHz radio. This is nonsense, of course, because you can’t bond the two together to achieve throughput that even approaches 750Mb/s.
D-Link markets this single-band (2.4GHz) router as particularly well suited for gaming and media streaming, and it is endowed with very good quality-of-service features, but QoS can’t magically render the 2.4GHz frequency band any less crowded. And given our relatively pristine test environment, the best word to describe the DIR-657’s range and TCP throughput is pathetic.
Trendnet was first‑to‑market with a dual-band USB adapter capable of supporting three 150Mb/s spatial streams on both the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands, and now it’s first‑to‑market with a router that does the same.
Looking to replace your aging wireless router? We benchmarked three brand-new models at Maximum PC Lab North, but each one is so different from the others that this shouldn’t be considered a three-way comparison. Belkin’s N750 DB is a dual-band model promising throughput of 300Mb/s on its 2.4GHz radio and 450Mb/s on its 5GHz radio, while D-Link’s DIR-657 is a more conventional single-band (2.4GHz) model claiming throughput of 300Mb/s. And Trendnet’s EW-692GR is the first dual-band router to deliver three 150Mb/s spatial streams (450Mb/s in aggregate) on both its 2.4- and 5GHz radios.
We weren’t impressed with the last Linksys-branded router that passed through Maximum Lab North. The dual-band Linksys E3000 (in reality, a rebadged Linksys WRT610N) delivered humdrum performance and lacked a number of important features we expect to find in a high-end router. The E4200 fares better, but we’re still scratching our heads over some of Linksys’s decisions.
Netgear has developed a bad habit of branding its new routers with two different model numbers. Take the WNDR4000—or is it the N750? Both names are printed on the box, and the router itself is labeled “N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router WNDR4000.”
We don’t much care what our routers look like, because they’re usually hidden inside a closet (unless we’re benchmarking them). But Asus’s engineers lavished as much attention on the RT-N56U’s skin as they did its guts: This dual-band router is a looker, and it’s also pretty damned fast.
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