Netgear R8000 Nighthawk X6 AC 3200 Tri-Band WiFi Router Review

Netgear R8000: Power Tests

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: Here we that these new generation of Wireless-AC routers are not exactly energy efficient in terms of Idle Power Consumption. The Netgear R8000 X6 leads the way in power usage taking 12.4 Watts at idle along with the Linksys WRT1900AC using 11.5 Watts of power compared to the older Linksys EA6500, Netgear R6300v1, and Buffalo WZR-D1800H. We do see a surprise with the newer Netgear R7000 and veteran D-Link DIR-868L with a very efficient power draw in the mid 7W range. 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: The numbers that we measured here were pretty telling on how each device was working. The dual-core 1.2GHz process in the Linksys WRT1900AC shot up to 17.5 Watts under load a 5W jump from idle. We thought this was pretty significant. The Netgear R8000 X6 was recorded at 13.6W under load, a jump of less than 2W over its idle measurement. It seems that this implementation of the Broadcom CPU is more efficient with its power.