ASUS RT-N66U – Speed Test
The ASUS RT-N66U Dark Knight is a Dual-band Wireless-N900 Gigabit router. It supports dual-band 5GHz and 2.4GHz with speeds up to 450Mbps concurrently. Meaning to say, you can reach up to 450Mbps on each individual radio (5GHz, 2.4GHz), that explains the Wireless-N900 portion (450Mbps + 450Mbps). Get it?
I will be doing some simple layman speed test that involves copying large files wirelessly and wired. For the wireless test, I will be using a 300Mbps Dual-band Wireless-N USB adaptor – ASUS USB-N53. Being a 300Mbps USB adaptor, I will not be able to hit the full potential of the RT-N66U. But if I max out on the 300Mbps adaptor, it means that the RT-N66U can handle more right? So lets see if it maximizes the 300Mbps throughput of the ASUS USB-N53.
The equipments
The equipments that are involved in the test are:
- ASUS RT-N66U
- ASUS USB-N53 for both Wireless-N tests
- IBM ThinkPad T43
- Apple iMac 27″
The tests
As I mentioned earlier, these are simple tests that involves copying of files to and fro computers to gauge the wireless and wired bandwidth. Wireless benchmarking can be tricky as wireless interference from other nearby wireless networks may jeopardize the results. The wireless client is 10 meters away from the ASUS RT-N66U.
The test involves copying of large files (300MB ~ 1000MB) to and fro the devices several times (4 each for upload and download) and getting the average speed.
Wired benchmark
For a start, I did a wired speed benchmark to make sure that there are no bottlenecks between the connected devices (IBM T43, iMac 27″ and RT-N66U). I think the wired speed looks good at 644.8Mbps upload and 623.0Mbps download.
Wireless-N 2.4GHz benchmark
Moved on to test the speeds on Wireless-N 2.4Ghz with 40MHz channel width. The ASUS RT-N66U achieved 86.1Mbps upload and 77Mbps download.
Wireless-N 5.0GHz benchmark
The last test is on Wireless-N 5.0Ghz with 40MHz channel width. It clocked 162.1Mbps for upload and 92.9MBps for download.
Conclusion
The performance of the ASUS RT-N66U is respectable, the wired LAN throughput hit an average of 634Mbps. For the wireless, it hit an average throughput of 81.5Mbps and 127.5MBps for 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz respectively. All these figures are very good results for a typical home user.
If you are looking for a great performing router, you should consider getting the ASUS RT-N66U.
