Netgear Nighthawk X4 AC2350 WiFi Router Review – Quad-Stream X4 Architecture

Netgear R7500: 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.

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: During idle, we see the Nighthawk X4 R7500 is one of the lower power use units in our suite. Using 8.3 Watts of power, the R7500 is very efficient during idle.

Benchmark Results: Under load by one wireless device, the R7500 uses 9.5 Watts of power making it our most efficient Wireless-AC unit that we have tested. Thanks to the new Qualcomm Atheros processor, the Nighthawk X4 not only produces cutting edge speeds for connected clients, but requires much less power than similarly equipped routers.