Amped Wireless TAP-R2 Touch Screen Wireless Router Review

By Ken Brown

Amped Wireless TAP-R2: Power Tests

Amped_TAP-R2-7

Power consumption by your homes electronic devices continues to be a very important issue so we have made an attempt to present some simple power consumption tests on the various routers that we had. To measure idle usage, we reset each wireless routers to the default settings and plugged them with no devices connected to them. We then measured the power draw from each router at the wall with our P3 International P4400 Kill-A-Watt electric usage monitor.

For the most part, when people start using these routers into their network, they really dont think about the power usage. In the above chart we have examined how each of these devices do when they are idle, but for power users who are using Bittorrent, playing online games, or who have busy small office, their routers are almost always in constant use. We were curious to see if there were any power differences between these networking devices at idle and when they are under full load.

The way we measured the power draw at load is that we started multiple instances of LAN Speed Test, our application to test the routers wireless throughput speeds. We did multiple instances of large packet sizes (5 GB) to keep the processors on each device busy. Each router was connected to our P3 International P4400 Kill-A-Watt electric usage monitor and the results are plotted below:

TAP-R2_Idle_Power

Benchmark Results: Our Idle Power Consumption chart shows the Amped Wireless TAP-R2 as the most energy efficient networking device we have used. We measured 3.0 Watts of power drawn when the screen is off, and another 0.5 Watts of power when the screen came on. This is still very, very low power consumption.

TAP-R2_Load_Power

Benchmark Results: Under load the Amped Wireless TAP-R2 measures a very conservative 5.0 Watts of power drawn. As it was under Idle conditions, when the screen is illuminated, the TAP-R2 consumes an extra 0.5 Watts of power. This level of power used easily outclasses all the other 802.11ac devices in our suite.