Linksys EA9200 AC3200 Tri-Band Smart Wi-Fi Router Review

Linksys EA9200: 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: Evaluating the New Generation of 802.11ac wireless routers, we see that most of the routers in our suite are fairly power hungry. The Linksys EA9200 is no different measuring 11.3 Watts making it the third highest power user.

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 Linksys EA9200 uses 13.1 Watts of power placing near the top of our list. This really isnt surprising since the router has 3 radios and multiple antennas.