Disassembly

Disassembly of the NETGEAR Nighthawk XR500 router is on the simpler side of things with four Philips head screws holding the two pieces of the plastic case together. These are hidden underneath the four rubber pads on the bottom, so you will have to pry them loose and use a precision Phillips screwdriver. Once all four screws are removed, note that the bottom piece has cutouts that go around the ports and buttons on the back, which means it needs to be slid out slowly lest you break the cutouts. Once done, the bottom piece can be separated from the rest of the router, and a closer look confirms the use of ABS plastic for the casing.


There are more screws holding the PCB in place on the top cover piece, and removing them, we can finally get the entire case out of the way, but not before noticing telltale marks of thermal pads on the underside of the case. Indeed, there is a metal plate on the underside which these pads make contact with as a heatsink of sorts, but the plastic case does not help its cause. Instead, this is where the hardware design relies on passive airflow via the cutouts in the case. Taking a look at both sides of the PCB, we see the aforementioned thermal pads that are over more metal—this time, heatsinks and covers for the core components on the dual-sided PCB. There are some extremely large metal heatsinks in use here, which will definitely help with heat transfer in this otherwise limited design.


Solder quality is exceptional here, with nearly everything machine assembled from the looks of things. There are simply too many components for them to be hand-soldered this well for a company the size of NETGEAR. We see some over-engineering as well, with Nichicon capacitors in play, including some rated for 100 µF and a breakdown voltage of 10 V, and another rated for a whopping 470 µF and 10 V. There isn't much on the PCB that will need such capacitance, but it remains appreciated.


We see a GST5009 magnetic module in use for long haul Gigabit Ethernet, which is also compliant over IEEE 802.3ab for when you need old school Wi-Fi connectivity. Alongside are two GST5014 magnetic modules doing the same for short-medium haul 100/1000 Mbps Ethernet connections. The rest of the hardware, including the flash memory, RAM, and the dual core processor, are all soldered to the PCB with large metal heatsink covers as seen above. These pads have thermal pads to aid in heat transfer, although the thermal pads are on the thicker side even though there is not really much preventing NETGEAR from using thinner pads and having a lower-profile router. For what it is worth, there were no performance issue with the router during the test period, although thermal testing is not easy owing to the various steps involved in heat dissipation from the various silicon pieces here. There were also two headers on the PCB I could not recognize, and NETGEAR helped here. The 4-pin header seen above is a serial-console connector, and a 10-pin header elsewhere on the PCB is a JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) used for design verification and internal testing of the PCB.


Looking at the edges of the PCB, we see the components that were hidden from view before—the actual indicator LEDs and various buttons, as well as the screw-down ends for the antennas themselves. Some of these jut out past the footprint of the PCB, and this is where reassembly has to be done carefully as described above when taking the router apart to ensure the cutouts in the plastic case match up and then go through the plastic hooks on both. We can also see that the PCB is multi-layered, as is the norm these days.

Before we move on, be advised that disassembly will void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decided to go ahead and do so anyway.