Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with corsair Memory and western digital linksys is back baby they got acquired by belkin about nine months ago and it only took them this long to say okay look the team that worked on the original wrt54g and the 54 GL was like okay look we want to go back to that we want to make that thing but we want to make it like better and modern because there's still people using that thing and it's only wireless-g for crying out loud it's not like i mean who even has any wireless g clients left anymore so this my friends is the updated one this is the grand daddy of home wireless routers and to be clear guys when I say granddaddy I mean expensive granddaddy it's going to come in at around three hundred dollars but it has technology to spare so it's about a 1.2 gigahertz CPU it has what there's some enterprise-grade features on it so to go along with the detachable antennas yes we've gone away from that whole cisco linksys integrated antennas for whatever reason they did that so you have a detachable antenna so you can put aftermarket ones on and it also has antenna diversity which allows them to auto sense which ones are best in terms of connectivity and range for a particular client and use the three that are going to work best in their labs they've seen up to thirty percent improvements now in terms of raw spec we've got four gigabit ethernet ports for land and then an additional 14 when an eSATA port which is a very unique addition one USB 3 port one USB 2 port a cooling fan remember there's a 1.2 gigahertz CPU inside and in addition to all that the bloody things going to weigh 5 pounds 5 pounds so while it's expensive it is also going to have that same team or a lot of the same team that worked on the original worked on this and they have made the decision those same people who make that decision in the first place to keep things open so if you don't like the firmware that linksys is running ok so like you can use like you know the stock firmware cloud firmware or you can configure it manually they don't care anymore or the level of not caring goes beyond that you can saw whatever firmware you want whether it's you know open wrt or dd-wrt or tomato or whatever those guys are going to be fully able to develop for this router although to be clear i was expecting this router to be the most impressive thing in the booth you know it's going to be like five pounds when they ship it and it's like got four antennas on it and stuff but this ended up being the most impressive thing in the booth is this is this an homage to South Park like the episode where they they go and they turn the internet back on because it's absolutely fantastic that's how iconic the wrt54g was is even in that southpark episode to turn the entire internet on and off it appeared to all run off of a single one of those routers and I hope it's a reference if it's not then it's still fantastic guys don't miss any of our coverage here from CES 2014 our trip to the show was powered by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service you can tell their sponsor because they're right here on the mic flag we were also sponsored here by corsair Memory and western digital those guys are great without them we wouldn't have been able to be here bringing you any of this fantastic content