Gadgetory

got a very special treat for you guys I've got for routers I have a zyxel nbg 5715 I have a d-link amplify a 1000 whole home router I've got a linksys e4200 and I have a trendnet TW 692 gr i am going to be doing a range test with these for high-end router so i'm going to be using a reference this is an old netgear wireless g router so don't judge netgear based on their performance in this particular test that's just as a reference so for kind of if you have an old middle-of-the-road router but it's kind of old than that to be a good reference point alright so what's unique about you to these routers let's do a quick summary so the zyxel one has a feature that's called beamforming to support extended coverage what that basically means is it uses its three antennas one two three in order to focus focus the transmission to where your devices are and extend the effective coverage now the d-link whole-home amplify branded router is uses six antennas and D links patented version called smart beam which allows it to in theory according to dealing provide pretty much the best coverage you can get this is a 300 megabit per second router this is a 450 megabit per second concurrent dual band router the trendnet one here the 69 to gr doesn't have that smart beam stuff so that's going to be a reference for a high-end dual-band concurrent 450 megabit per second router that does not have that technology and finally we've got the cisco efore to 200 which is well ok links to see 4200 which I mean come on it's cisco it's their high-end router right now let's see how it compares what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be taking this tablet right here and I am going to be walking around to three different reference points in around my property and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take readings I'm gonna it's going to be approximate a little bit guys this is not perfect science I'm going to take readings on both the 2.4 gigahertz wireless network as well as the 5 gigahertz wireless network and let you guys know how it's going to go for all the routers on using their maximum transmit power I'm going to be using channel 64 wireless and 2.4 gigahertz and there's a reason I'm doing that the reason is there is one other network in my neighborhood using channel 6 we're going to see how it performs when there's one low signal strength network that's interfering a little bit these are both me I have two routers on right now don't worry about be doing that during the test and then channel and then five gigahertz I'm going to be using the default which is let it find its own frequency and see how well it can perform at five gigahertz with no interference letting it pick its own transmission speed so i'm going to show you guys all the different places where i'm going to test from and yeah let's see how this goes alright the routers have their firmware is updated so here we go we're going to do the baseline first that is the zyxel ma are the the netgear model and so baseline reading shows us that yes the netgear router is very strong i also want to talk a little bit about come on focus please i want to talk a little bit about the rating system here so we can see these are rated in decibels from minus 42 minus 100 with this being better so every approximately three decibels represents a halving of the transmission and receiving power ok guys so if it falls down to minus forty three one two three here that means it's about half as strong as minus forty if it falls down to minus fifty that means it is one-tenth as strong as minus forty so I want you guys to bear that in mind minus fifty is one-tenth as strong as minus 40-60 is a tenth as strong as that or 100 as strong as this minus seventy is another tenth of 60 s 80 s of 70 and so on and so forth so 10 100 1000 10000 a hundred thousand million so this is actually a million times less strong than that according to my quick math which might be wrong but you guys get the point okay so it's a factor of 10 every time we go ten of these all right let's go to baseline reading a media or away from the router is obviously good let's go to the guest bedroom and I'll show you guys where I'm going to put the tablet when I take my measurements in here alright so I'm going to put the tablet right here and fire up Wi-Fi analyzer now this test isn't going to be perfect you guys are going to have to rely on me to approximate in a way that is meaningful and representative of the facts because here's the reality of it when we look at the netgear router here you can see it moves around a lot so between minus 70 here and minus eighty has already occurred which means that that's that's a ten times difference just between those two lines so all my other routers are off these are just neighboring routers that are interfering right now all of my neighbors are off so that means that um actually this one of my neighbors is stronger than the netgear one through about four walls between my guest bedroom and the computer room there so this is where the tablet will sit when i take this particular reading and I will not stand between it and the router I'll let it stabilize a little bit and then I'll probably provide a range so based on looking at this I would say somewhere in the you know what it might just be here now that I'm not standing in the way anymore i can probably just say minus 70 for that fatigue climbing i might do a range sorry guys i know this is kind of dragging on yeah i'll probably just say minus 70 for that or minus 72 minus 65 our next test the location is going to be down in the garage because that is somewhere that i often use my tablet we got some interesting props being made down here right now for the NCIX christmas party ok moving over here ok in the brush go over here going over to my racket stringing machine where I often put a tablets like mush videos so this with me standing right here because there's not a whole lot of other room for me this is where it will go for the garage test and so I'm just going to do the reference score for the netgear router here let things stabilize a little bit wow there's a lot of different a lot of different potentially interfering Wi-Fi networks down here so that will help evaluate the routers in some way I would imagine okay so since we've been down here for this one I'm probably going to say something like let's maybe late for one or two more tix here but this one looks an awful lot like minus 60 to me yep we're gonna go with minus 60 for that one all right we're off to the next destination and that is outside yes the great outdoors gamers worst enemy unless it's like beautifully rendered directx11 outdoors okay so we're going outside and it's raining so let me just get my umbrella going here okay there we go so we're going to go all the way out to the back of my property you guys aren't going to be able to see a freaking thing for this part of the video but that's okay you'll just have to kind of trust me see the pretty graph although i'm not going to hold the tablet out there too much because uh yeah it's raining and stuff and right now i'm holding a camera a tablet my notepad and an umbrella and trying not to drop any of them because they're all valuable and stuff ok so we're oh yeah let's go to the shed that's perfect because that way i can actually put the tablet somewhere so my house is over there ok that's the guest bedroom right in the middle of the frame right now you guys so that should give you some idea how much further away we are now it's probably about another mmm i'd say we're about another 15 metres away so maybe about 45 feet for the Americans in the audience ok here we are drop to the umbrella so I'm gonna put it right on the corner of this workbench and we are going to see haha so we saw what happened to the wireless signal as we moved away from the house and we can see that for all intents and purposes it's pretty much crap from here which is actually exactly what I was hoping because this is meant to be our reference and then we're going to see if powerful new routers can punch through the distance and space between my house and my shed and deliver a good wireless routing experience so we're gonna call that about minus eighty five now that I've actually put it down and watched a couple ticks so what I'm going to do guys is now I'm gonna take these measurements for all these different routers and I will present the results at the end it'll be time consuming but you guys are worth it so I'm going to try and keep this reasonably short but it's going to be pretty difficult let me start off by saying that I beat up this sort of old I call it old a lot of times this netgear router at the very beginning of this but so what is this the wgr614 v7 okay so this little router you know showed up showed up for the fight and in spite of its one antenna so this is a three antenna model three antennas six internal antennas no idea but it's got internal antennas and according to linksys they're pretty beast d router so this is an N 452 megabit concurrent dual band 450 megabit concurrent dual bend for 50 / 300 dual band and a 300 megabit single band wireless g single band ok let's go through some numbers here so computer room guest bedroom garage and backyard shed those are my four columns ok so the netgear router gave us baseline readings of a vote let's okay remember higher numbers are worse the lower number the better the reception was ok guys so that means that minus 40 here that's kind of a baseline ok so then we're somewhere in the 65 to 70 range 60 in the garage and 85 at the backyard shed at the end of it all this was actually one of the best scores posted in the backyard shed the linksys e4200 actually you know what let's go computer room let's do it that way we'll go column by column so in the computer room the strongest baseline reading was the whole home router from d-link actually no it was the 69 to gr from trendnet all only on its 2.4 gigahertz band though what's weird is it was significantly worse on its 5 gigahertz band and this trend continued throughout the entire test so that's the only consistent scorer that was best was the whole home router at minus 25 the linksys e4200 was at about minus 48 minus 30 this trend also continued the whole time the 2.4 gigahertz band not performing nearly as well on the e 4200 as the 5 gigahertz band so the winner in the computer room I'm going to go ahead and give it to the d-link whole home router remember that's the one that has the multiple antennas that detect where you are and then orient their wireless coverage to best suit you in the guest bedroom the far and away winner was the whole home router from d-link the dir 6061 hold on 614 or something like that 645 the dir 645 so remember minus 54 compared to let's say the linksys e4200 s best score minus sixty-two is almost ten times better than minus sixty-two which is the five gigahertz band and is a hundred times better than minus seventy four on the 2.4 gigahertz band to give you guys some context for that number so all the other ones are in that like one-tenth the strength of the whole home router here however when we get down to the garage it loses that lead so about three decibels is about double is double so what that means is that the e 4200 2.4 gigahertz band and now scores double as well as the whole home routers 2.4 gigahertz band remember this is a single band router so there's no getting away from interference so this might work really well in a large home in like suburbia but if you were in a condo this would not be the best solution because it doesn't have dual band so you're gonna have to fight with all those other people with their with their old cheap routers or CIA keep eating this up but it performed really really well look at this it actually gave up the best score and garage so anyway yeah by old I just mean 2.4 gigahertz running on those same frequencies that are very crowded so that's what it'll have to compete with and yeah as my okay might so my hypothesis about this guy the 645 is that at a moderate range it is able to align itself to perform as you can see here dramatically better than the static orientation of their Wireless zones routers however as we get further away it really drops off one of the other things I also did observe is that about this number is that while this is a little bit lower than some of the other routers it was always very consistent so we're with most of these routers I was looking at a graph that sort of went something like this and then I'm just kind of taking an average line for you guys here the whole home router was usually like that very very steady these numbers are one hundred percent absolute at these locations which is very interesting okay so in the garage yes the big winner was the old netgear router the g router however okay something to bear in mind you're too though guys is that compared to let's say the the links to see 4200 where we have got about half the signal strength in the garage on the 5 gigahertz band we're talking wireless-n 450 megabit per second we're talking if your tablet is wireless n this is probably still going to give you better speed than ancient wireless-g 54 seconds with a better signal strength so just because you have an old router just because you're strong signals there your signal strength is strong doesn't mean your data transfer rate is actually the best that's something I'll probably want to investigate a little bit later that I just didn't have time tonight so let's go to the backyard shed the only router that really the only routers that really passed this test for the netgear router and the dlink dir 645 the other routers failed it on at least one of their bands which means they dropped below minus 100 so the e 4200 just barely hung in there on its 5 gigahertz band it managed to hold a line at minus 95 and I was like okay I guess you probably can't even brow the web at that kind of signal strength and then the zyxel and the trendnet routers on their 2.4 gigahertz bands were able to achieve above minus 90 at once again though these were people they look like this you're probably not even browsing the web at that kind of signal strength so okay I'm going to go through the graph one more time netgear linksys d-link sykesville trendnet computer room guest bedroom garage backyard shed these are the numbers when I'd split the column that means I'm looking at the two bands separately two point four and five gigahertz so you can see I've done that so I just want the camera to go and have up oh okay come look at me and then go have a close look at the graphs if you guys want to pause that and just kind of look at it in detail I think there's some interesting information here at the end of the day though what we've what we've come down to is that advances in antenna technology or not really moving that far ahead unless we look at specific cases like the dir 645 we're at moderate ranges and even at extreme ranges we were able to achieve a much more steady signal even though at when we got to let slightly further away distances it wasn't at it wasn't necessarily a stronger signal than the others just more steady so thank you for checking out this little round up I hope you guys found it useful don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos