Test Setup

The test setup we use is described in the table below.


Of course, not all ten client PCs are necessary for our router reviews. In most cases, three clients are more than enough to check on a router's WAN and LAN throughput and Wi-Fi performance.


For the Wi-Fi performance tests, we also use an Asus RT-AC68U Wi-Fi router.

Thanks Section

Building a suitable test bed for NAS, switch, or router reviews is really hard and expensive; however, we were lucky enough to have the support of several companies we would like to mention and thank, one by one.

Shuttle for helping us acquire twelve DS81 barebone slim-PCs.



OCZ for the RevoDrive 350 and dozen ARC 100 SSDs with a capacity of 240 GB each.



ZyXEL for the XS1920 10GbE Smart Managed Switch.



CyberPower Systems for kindly providing the PR2200ELCDSL UPS (Professional Tower Series).



Caseking.de for kindly providing six Intel Pentium G3260 CPUs.



Overclockers.co.uk for kindly providing six Intel Pentium G3260 CPUs.



Corsair for kindly providing the DDR3 SODIMM memory kits.

Methodology

We use two different programs to evaluate the router's performance. The first is a custom-made benchmark suite that performs ten basic file transfer tests and measures the average MB/s speed for each. To extract results that are as accurate as possible, we run all selected tests ten times and use the average as the final result. The second program is iPerf, a widely known networking testing tool. With iPerf, we measure the maximum achievable bandwidth in any usage scenario.



If the router has USB port(s), we use a HyperX Savage USB 3.1 (Gen 1) flash drive to test external storage performance.