Belkin AC 1200 DB 802.11ac router review: A model that’s not quite ready for prime time - hardertraturness

If you're intractable at the vista of spending nearly $400 to buy an 802.11ac router and an 802.11ac bridge circuit to go with information technology, Belkin has a less-expensive alternative for you. With a street monetary value of $160, the Belkin AC 1200 DB costs about $40 less than the 802.11ac routers from Asus (the RT-AC66U), D-Link (the DIR-865L), and Netgear (the R6300). Unlike the similarly priced Buffalo WZR-D1800H, nevertheless, Belkin's router delivers lower specs, too.

The other four 802.11ac routers I tested use 802.11ac and 802.11n radios that support three spatial streams on for each one frequency band, just the Belkin Ac 1200 Decibel's radios support only two. As a resultant, whereas each of the other quartet routers delivers a wireless 802.11ac network with maximum theoretical throughput of 1.3 gigabits per second, plus a concurrent 802.11n mesh with maximum theoretical throughput of 450 megabits per 2d, the Belkin AC 1200 DB's theoretical maximums are 867 mbps and 300 mbps, respectively.

The AC 1200 DB has a vertical orientation, which should termination in bettor range than routers that sit flat on a surface, even though its antennas are hidden inside its plastic inclosure. There is no provision for mounting the router on a paries. Belkin provides two USB 2.0 ports on the hindmost of the router, to defend web-attached storage and a divided up printer. I didn't try to connect a USB printing machine, but the AC 1200 DB was much slower than the past 802.11ac routers at authorship large files and small files to an attached USB disk drive. IT likewise finished perfectly last at meter reading those files from the attached drive.

The AC 1200 provides a DLNA-compliant media server, parental controls that let you block access to indecorous websites, and a basic quality-of-service engine that Belkin dubs Intellistream. QoS is supposed to shape your network traffic so that jug-sensitive applications such as games, media streaming, and VoIP receive higher antecedence than fall behind-insensitive apps such as BitTorrent downloads. But Belkin doesn't allow you to configure any QoS settings manually; Intellistream is intended to do that for you automatically after you run a characteristic speed test. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the speed test to extend to to closing. Belkin clearly needs to improve Intellistream in order to shuffling it useful and worthy of recommendation.

The AC 1200 arrived from the factory with channel bonding disabled on its 2.4GHz receiving set but enabled connected its 5GHz energy. When I unexpected the 2.4GHz radio to blend two 20MHz channels to produce an 802.11n web with 40MHz of bandwidth, the router responded by earning two second-locate finishes.

Benchmarking 5GHz 802.11ac performance

I used an AVADirect laptop computer equipped with a 2.5GHz Intel Essence i5-3210M Processor, 4GB of memory, and an integrated Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-Fi adapter to run my benchmark tests. The Ultimate-N 6300 can air and receive tierce simultaneous 150-mbps spatial streams (450 mbps in total); about adapters are limited to handling two (300 mbps in total). This was all the streaming I needed to evaluate the AC 1200's 802.11n performance (on some the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz frequency bands). To measure the router's 802.11ac performance on the 5GHz frequency stripe, I obtained an engineering sample of Belkin's new Video Link 802.11ac media bridge, which I connected to the AVADirect's ethernet port. The Telecasting Link closely resembles the router.

To test the router, I positioned the client successively at Phoebe spots inside and outside a 2800-square-foot, spread-style home (distances from the router are noted in each chart below). I used the nonunion-source IPERF bench mark (and the JPERF Java graphical front remainder designed for information technology). To measure the router's downlink TCP throughput, I piece the laptop as a server and victimised a background PC hard-wired to the router as the node.

The Atomic number 89 1200 delivered disappointing 802.11ac performance at intimate straddle, with the client 9 feet away from the router and in the same room. With Transmission control protocol throughput of just 162 mbps, this 802.11ac router was even slower than the 802.11n Asus RT-N66U router I used as a reference.

As the chart below indicates, the AC 1200 DB's performance didn't meliorate when I moved the client to my kitchen test surroundings, 20 feet away from the router with cardinal wall separating them from the router. In one case again, the Belkin AC 1200 finished dead survive connected the throughput test.

The next two benchmark runs took place at heart my home theater. This is a room-within-a-board intention, with four walls of 2-by-4 framing and wallboard inside four walls of 2-past-6 framing and drywall, with about 6 inches of dead air and fiberglass insulation separating them. My design was to optimise the elbow room's acoustics, not to build a Faraday John Cage, but many little routers and other wireless devices wealthy person had trouble penetrating it. However, none of the 802.11ac routers I tested had any difficulty arrival the client in this room, and the Belkin really outperformed American bison's router when the client was on the coffee table in this room.

Since many people will wish to connect the gear in their home entertainment arrangement to an 802.11ac network, I decided to measure TCP throughput with the media bridge inside the built-in equipment console in my home theater (the floor-to-cap, wall-to-wall cabinet is constructed from cabinet-form plywood, including the back). As the chart below indicates, the Ac 1200 DB's TCP throughput born away nearly half in this location, but it still provided more enough bandwidth to wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO image of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Menage Server 2011 machine in my home office to a house-theater PC in the entertainment center, including its high-definition soundtrack.

The Ac 1200 Decibel performed slenderly better when I moved the client and the media bridge to the ordinal of my cardinal outdoor test locations?an exterior patio enclosed by three walls and one incomplete wall with looking glass Windows. In the real world, I dubiousness that anyone would strain to set high a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and finding an outlet (and prospective an extension corduroy) are too inconvenient. Hither again, Belkin up in last place, owing to its deuce-stream radio.

My sec outdoor location was a picnic table situated whole extracurricular my house. At this location, the router and client were 75 feet apart and separated by three insulated DoI walls, and unrivalled insulated out wall clad on extraordinary position with fiber-cement lapboard. Under these conditions, the source 802.11n router delivered TCP throughput of just 30.2 mpbs, but Belkin's router achieved TCP throughput of 78.2 mbps?far best performance than Bison bison's WZR-1800H managed. The first-place finisher at this location, D-Link's DIR-865L, delivered an astonishing 152 mbps.

Benchmarking 2.4GHz 802.11n carrying out

Most of the routers I reliable in 2.4GHz mode low-backed bump off of line bonding owing to the faint presence of other routers using the same spectrum, but the Belkin AC 1200 stuck to its guns and continuing to provide 40MHz of bandwidth. Stomping on neighboring wireless networks won't win you whatsoever friends, though, and it leave be interesting to see if Belkin allows this to continue once the Wisconsin-Fi Bond begins certifying 802.11ac routers.

In whatsoever event, channelise soldering enabled the AC 1200 DB to earn a prototypical-place tie and a second-place cease when the client was closest to the router, despite its providing only when two spatial streams, as the following chart illustrates.

Belkin's 2.4GHz electronic network born to fourth place when the client was set ahead up in my home theater or out connected my patio, finishing ahead of Buffalo's WZR-D1800H ineach character. It bested some the American buffalo and D-Tie routers when the client was uttermost from the router. That third-seat finish is impressive for a two-stream router.

Benchmarking hardwired ethernet performance

The AC 1200 DB's iv-port gigabit ethernet switch performed as expected, delivering TCP throughput of 943 mbps?right in line with most of the rest of the athletic field.

To evaluate the AC 1200 DB's performance every bit a network-attached storage twist, I connected a 500GB Western Digital My Passport USB drive to one of the router's USB ports. I used a stopo watch to time how long it took the unit to copy a couple of files from a Microcomputer to the push back complete the network (a publish tryout), then I copied a couple of files from the USB movement to the networked Microcomputer over the electronic network (a read test). The PC was hardwired to the meshwork.

I created a large-file test past ripping a DVD (Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk to Penetrate) to the PC's hard parkway. My advice: Don't buy this router if you think back you might ever want to use the Belkin router's USB port for network-affianced memory. Copying this 4.29GB file from the PC to the take-away disk drive required a mind-blowing 2211 seconds (almost 37 minutes). The fastest router I time-tested, Asus's RT-AC66U, accomplished the same task in less than 5 minutes. If I had any drawing skills, I'd have tweaked the chart below to show the Belkin (and the D-Link) routers busting finished the right-paw border representing the chart's 10-minute limit. Even so, both routers outperformed the Buffalo, which didn't pick out my NTFS-formatted Winchester drive at all.

The Belkin (and the D-Link) routers performed much better when the task was to translate that single large file cabinet from the attached USB Winchester drive. As the graph below shows, the Belkin outperformed every unusual router on this bench mark.

Unless you rou a lot of movies from DVD or Blu-ray discs, you'll rarely move a single large file away to a hard drive intended to your router. A more common task is to move batches of weeny files indorse and forth across your network. To evaluate each router's performance in that scenario, I created a unwed pamphlet containing 595MB of moderate files (subfolders containing music, graphics, photos, documents, spreadsheets, so happening).

As depicted by the chart below, the AC 1200 was very much faster at copying lots of small files to an attached ram down than at copying a 1 puffy file. But its performance connected the former task still looks anemic when compared to it of the rest of the playing area: The router needed more than 6 proceedings to compose 595MB of small-file out information to the drive.

The same criticism applies to its performance in retrieving a plurality of small files from an attached embarrassing drive, Eastern Samoa indicated away the graph below.

Bottom line

Belkin's AC 1200 DB receiving set router is lighter happening specs, features, and performance than the rest of the field. Its two-spatial-pullulate radios prevented it from finishing initiative in any tests, only it did surprise me by finishing second connected two of my benchmarks (albeit while examination its 2.4GHz 802.11n functioning). In point of fact it delivered improve 2.4GHz 802.11n performance than several of the more worldly-wise routers, thanks to its dogged insistence on maintaining channel bonding in that spectrum.

The value of having two USB ports?one for sharing a printer, and the other for sharing a USB hard drive over the network?is severely diminished by the router's carrying out while hosting a memory device. With one exception, the Atomic number 89 1200 DB was excruciatingly slow when reading and writing files over the network. This is clearly a checkbox item for Belkin, kinda than an essential feature. Anyone with serious meshing storage needs would equal well advised to buy a dedicated NAS box, just if you must depend on the to a lesser extent-expensive alternative of using router-hosted storage, you should head off this specific router.

Note: This review is part of a roundup. Click here to read the introduction to the story and find golf links to the different 802.11ac routers reviewed at the same time.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/461240/belkin_ac_1200_db_802_11ac_router_not_quite_ready_for_prime_time.html

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