| ASUS RT-N56U Wireless-N Gigabit Router |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Network | |
| Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst | |
| Sunday, 17 April 2011 | |
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ASUS RT-N56U Wi-Fi Gigabit Router Review
Manufacturer: ASUS Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by ASUS. Stylish and router are two words that would not normally be put together in a sentence without a negative term preceding them somehow, but the tables are turning now as we look at the latest offering from ASUS. Today, Benchmark Reviews brings you the ASUS RT-N56U Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router. As you will see in the images that follow, the ASUS RT-N56U certainly has an air of class about it and is different in that way from 99% of routers on offer today. The RT-N56U has five built in antennae to allow simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals to run at up to 300Mb/s concurrently, this allows you to stream HD content to your media devices (5GHz) while you enjoy uninterrupted wireless internet (2.4GHz). On the box ASUS claim that the RT-N56U allows for true Gigabit WAN to LAN throughput (900Mb/s) but as with most claims this doesn't always come true, our testing threw out some good numbers but nowhere near ASUS' claims. The ASUS RT-N56U has two built in USB 2.0 ports that allow you to share printers and USB storage over LAN and WAN, and it also allows you to download to your USB connected storage device while your PC is turned off.
Before we get to the testing we will have a good look at the RT-N56U and its features, so without further hesitation let's move on.
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Comments
Are you telling us that you dont have a laptop or other device that has 300mbps 802.11n with 2.4Ghz and/or 5Ghz ???
being a former reviewer myself i am appauled that you people have access to some of the best equipment available today and you dont even use the proper testing hardware or methodology.
Its getting harder and harder to read you peoples reviews. They are kore of a joke than anything.
And i cant believe you have dont anything but pi$$ off Asus with this review.
Why dont you remove this review before you hurt your own tarnished reputation and Asus'
Your comments suggest the latter, so please take the time to read the entire article before you run your mouth.
Also both of you please learn to spell and use correct punctuation and grammar before you make your next response.
As you doubtless know, the maximum theoretical throughput of a wireless router is something only reached in an RFI-shielded testing room with a pair of routers sitting rather close to each other. As Steven's tests show, the throughput tested with the Belkin USB router didn't come close to saturating even the 150Mb/s connection (there's that pesky "real world" interfering again!), so I don't understand why you think a faster connection would have made any difference. But then I'm not an expert on RFI propagation. Maybe you can explain it to me.
The new ASUS RT-N56U promised much better throughput. I tested it and discovered, as the reviewer noted, that the throughput never reached 150 Mbps. Worse, as the load increased (I have multiple computers doing various tasks such as streaming HD media files, music, and printing) the speed dropped to less than 80 Mbps for simple Internet connectivity.
This is basically a small computer that runs itself in Linux, with a modern Ralink chipset and 128 MB DDR Memory. As long as you update the firmware, go through all the settings and set this up properly, it will be a stable and stellar performer for anyone. Personally, I use random 63 character wpa2 password and reject my neighbor's mac address since he is a hack. If you have a real network printer with an Ethernet cable connecting it, simply copy the printer's mac address and lock it down to something standared like 192.168.1.200 and you will not have any issues at all! Simple and stable and secure!
Personally, the ASUS router is nice to look at, clean it with a synthetic cloth, as you would use to wax a high end car and it will be a pleasure to look at every day. Simple to clean also!
Now the best part in my opinion is that ASUS writes the firmware and they are a computer manufacturer with good code writers. Incidentally, had so many problems with firmware for a netgear wndr-3700 that I am selling that unit, which performed slower all around and had poor 5GHz signal strength in contrast to the ASUS RT-N56U! While I praise Netgear's Pro Safe professional series of equipment and recommend it for my client's, their consumer line seems much less refined.
ASUS RT-N56U is a WINNER for myself.
Umm... no, you don't assume that this is the maximum throughput based on just one Wireless G and one Wireless N adapter. If you are going to publish test results you should at least use multiple adapters from different vendors and a faster N adapter (300Mb/s) to see the routers true potential. This is an unfair review for ASUS.
Watch this space.
A statement such as "without further network adapters to test with these results were the maximum throughput that we could achieve" would be more appropriate.
Thank you for replying promptly though.