Gadgetory

this project began as a plan to review the ruckus our 700 enterprise-grade access point $1,000 AC wireless access point as a standalone AP and then compare it against a reasonable cross-section of other AC access points including ubiquitous and muraki's mr 18 I had this Gigantor spreadsheet where I was going to put all the data and everything and then I took a step back and realized I was tackling too much at once the first thing I need to establish before I start evaluating you know which business grade Wi-Fi gear is best from an enthusiast perspective is whether enthusiasts should care about this product category at all or if they should keep spending all their money on graphics cards so that's what's coming in this video oh and coming soon is our review of the Logitech G 9 10 RGB mechanical keyboard but first the intro from December 13th to 20th 2014 you can save on select until CPU Schnucks and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers click now to learn more so where would I get the idea that any individual consumer might want to spend this much on an access point raucous thought it was stupid and refused to even loan me one to do this kind of a test but I really wanted to try it so I actually bought one to do this video I was inspired by an awesome article that I read on WLAN proz.com while researching solutions to my ongoing issues with periodic hiccups and NVIDIA games dream and HD movie streaming to my media center in the article they investigated the performance of a variety of high end ApS in a classroom environment and while the nuts and bolts of the results you know which model one which test etc have lost some of their relevance since there are newer products released now the realization that I had while reading it was that most router tests are basically being done in a vacuum so to speak to control variables a perfectly reasonable thing to do many reviewers will pair a single client to the access point measure the speed and then if we're lucky they'll do it again from a few different distances so we can get some idea of how that performance scales over on an area but this doesn't address what kind of performance you can expect when multiple clients are running intensive tasks concurrently something that can happen easily in the real world if you've got a few family members with their own mobile devices in your home so I designed my tests and I can already see having finished the data now that they've got some issues but it's a start with the intention of determining not only the performance at various ranges of a high-end router with an integrated access point like a consumer-grade thing versus a top-of-the-range business AC access point but also the performance at a fixed range when there are many other clients across the network putting load on it so I'll start with the range data the range on the r700 is truly exceptional inside the house and even from the front yard speeds were less are similar to what my Linksys wrt54g location but once I got across the street in front of the house it was 30% faster and then when I walked down to my mailbox a total distance of about a hundred and twenty feet with the neighbor's house directly between my Droid turbo and the access point it was still able to achieve acceptable sustained speeds for web browsing and even light media streaming next we'll look at our four scenarios that I used to evaluate performance with other clients using the network in the light test every access point configure I tried worked fine but we can already see performance of the iperf test fall off a little bit especially on the wrt just from having google play music a twenty seven fifty kilobyte twitch stream running at source quality and a PC refreshing a basic webpage every three seconds running to simulate what it might be like when a few family members are on their phones or computers on an average evening in the medium load test I add a second video stream running on the same PC that's doing our internet browsing test it's a 20 megabit 1080p video the kind that many people download to an ass and then watch from a computer there were no interruptions to any of the devices in the medium test either and any config in the heavy load test we add another 2750 twitch stream and a 20 megabits 720p and video game stream stream and this is where the men gets separated from the boys with game stream decent throughput is necessary but latency is of paramount importance because the user is interacting with a remote PC in real time in our case and in a Sai gaming notebook this was the last test where the r700 achieved perfect performance at 2.4 gigahertz before running the stress test and once the stress compress got turned on it turned to crap with one of the twitch streams being interrupted and gaming on the shield becoming impossible so that is something to bear in mind as you look at the throughput numbers in these tests if running the stress test causes other clients to stop working then it's not a representation of how much the network can handle on top of what it's already doing at 5 gigahertz the r700 handled this flawlessly even completing the stress test with only occasional choppiness in the game stream test but the same cannot be said for the wrt not only did it put up much worse numbers during the stress test but before the test even started on 5 gigahertz one of the PC video streams failed outright and game stream was hitching periodically which leads us to the torture test where we found that we could reach the limits of the r700 by throwing another laptop running at 1080p YouTube video and a 50 megabit 1080p network video stream and an Nvidia shield portable running a 3000 kilobit per second video stream and even then it actually has performed reasonably well now I did manage to get this 50 megabits stream to glitch out a little bit earlier in the day but now everything is running flawlessly even with the torture tests so that means we are pretty much at the limit now when I run the test itself for the throughput when I run the throughput test Tomb Raider will chop and then this video will definitely turn off but overall a very impressive job is being done by the r700 of managing this workload another cool thing to note is it even with all this running if you run a speed test on another computer completely unrelated somewhere else in the house but connected wirelessly you can still get like seven millisecond ping times to nearby servers which is about what I can do on a wired connection so just something here will suffer but it does a great job of managing all that the inaudible you RT was a total mess in this test though so I'm reporting 14 mega bit for the iperf test but it's a completely meaningless number I mean even without I perf running both PC video streams cut out the YouTube stream cut out and game stream was completely unusable only the twitch streams managed to hold together so closing thoughts time do high end access points make sense for enthusiast consumers honestly I think the answer is mostly no not really anything anyone with a large house like 2500 square feet or more and multiple stories who doesn't want to deal with slow range extenders or multiple access points and then the lousy connections sometimes and handoff issues that are associated with that may actually benefit from one of these but they are paying a lot for features that they'll never use like the ability to add a dedicated controller somewhere else in the house and more access points to build a managed array of access points for most people adding additional consumer ApS on different channels and then switching between them manually especially on 5 gigahertz where there are so many channels available will be much more economical and as long as the clients are more spread out than they were in our torture tests higher performance overall anyway since you can spread out too many more of those available channels so I don't think I'll be following this up with more standalone high-end AP videos unless you guys feel like it's really necessary but I'm still glad I did this you know I learned a lot and in spite of some frustration it was kind of fun to I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did speaking of things you might enjoy it's the holiday season and our sponsor for today's video wants you to have an AR s x7 pro gaming notebook for Christmas I mean okay they're not giving it away or anything but if you're in the market for a beast super-thin gaming machine now or maybe right after the holidays with your Christmas money it is definitely worth a look it's got top of the range specs including a core i7 quad core and dual 970 ends in sli the performance of which we checked out in our showdown a little while back which you can check out here thanks gigabyte for sponsoring today's episode thanks to you guys for watching and I think that's pretty much it guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you just liked it leave a comment letting me know what you thought about this video because it was it was a bit of a beast to put together thanks again for oh right also linked in the video description there's a support us linking my cool t-shirt like this one give us a monthly contribution or change your amazon bookmark one with our affiliate code so when you go buy that a OSX 7 pro notebook we get a kickback it helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe