ASUS RT-AC3200 Tri-Band Wireless Router Review
ASUS RT-AC3200: Power Consumption
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.
Benchmark Results: During idle, ASUS RT-AC3200 is one of the most power hungry routers in our suite. Along with the Netgear R8000, the ASUS consumes almost double the amount of power than our very good Netgear R7000 and D-Link 880L. While these numbers seem large, the fact that the ASUS RT-AC3200 and Netgear R8000 have three radio bands to power, it is understandable why they draw a significant amount of power compared to other 802.11ac routers.
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:
Benchmark Results: Under load, the ASUS RT-AC3200 uses 14.2 Watts of power making it – again – one of our most power hungry Wireless-AC devices. If we compare it to the other Tri-Band routers in our suite, the measured numbers of the ASUS aren’t really that far off. It is interesting to note that there is only a few Wattage jump from the idle and load power usage numbers.