D-Link DIR-880L Wireless AC1900 Dual Band Gigabit Cloud Router

D-Link DIR-880L: 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: Even though the D-Link DIR-880L has dual-core processor, the unit idles using the least amount of power as compared to the other routers in our test suite. The 7.4 Watts used is the lowest power use that we have seen from an 802.11ac router. This low idle power usage should certainly save money over the lifetime of the use of the unit.

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: Even under load, the D-Link D-880L is still the most power efficient network devices we have seen on our test bench. Pulling at just over 8 Watts, we see the next lowest competitor is from the D-Link DIR-868L.