Power Consumption, USB3 and Wired performance

Power Consumption

For the final series of tests, we look at power consumption among others. It's a hot topic these days and, well, we measure using a 10M distance setup, meaning we test with an active WIFI link (the throughput test). We measure this at the wall socket side with the help of a power monitor which can measure to a tenth of a Watt accuracy. This device measures in-between the wall socket and router. 

Above, power consumption, while we transmit from the laptop to a client-side PC. Wireless is obviously one of the more power consuming features to use. In IDLE the router uses, give or take, 13 Watts continuously and over 14 Watts with RGB LEDs on. At 23 cents per kWh this is roughly 28 bucks per year of power. 

USB 3.1 Performance

With the help of USB 3.1 you get fast storage on the router. Since the router allows you to share the files on external storage, the router basically functions as a NAS. Handy for UPnP needs and such. So we figured it would be nice to observe how fast USB 3.1 is on these routers:

The performance is pretty good. The test involves nothing other than copying from and to the USB device. When coupled with a portable USB drive connected to its USB 3.0 port, the router shows a sustained WRITE speed of ~63 MB/s and it closes in at 107 MB/sec READ performance. That pretty much is the maximum performance of our USB device used. I guess we need to update to something SSD / USB 3.1 soon for this test.

A LAN-to-LAN network test reveals closer to full Gigabit performance over the ethernet jacks. Few routers these days have an issue here and this product performs as expected. We also included switch results of 2.5, 5 and 10 GigE. ASUS offers one single 2.5 GigE port in simplified wording, that's almost 300 MB/sec over that 2.5 GigE port, however with just one port how would you hook up more devices (switch)? You can't, so the 2.5 GigE connector is interesting for hyper-fast WAN connections.