Using LACP direct from router to NAS is such a damn waste. If you put an enterprise switch in the middle of that you would get more than a 2x latency improvement to both your internet and files when using multiple clients on the network.
Right now I have a 3 channel LACP to my vHost and a 2 channel to my router with a Procurve in the middle and its incredible how low latency you get on requests compared to single channel setups.
LACP is going to do absolutely nothing for you in regards to a noticeable latency decrease. The link bit-time is still exactly the same as without LACP, you only gain parallelism. Even if it did decrease your already sub-millisecond LAN latency, that would amount to squat when your internet connection already has at least a few milliseconds of latency. You might go from 15.1 ms to 15.05 ms... again, that's only if it did anything for you at all.
I think what he means is that you'd want wired clients for the NAS, instead of forcing all access through the wireless router. At least, that's the only way I can think of to make his comment remotely sensible.
Yeah, so you get a latency decrease by serving two packets at a time. You get the biggest benefit from using srv-io and multiple vm servers off a lacp array. The setup described above still has a single channel bottleneck unless there's an internal switch attaching the wireless module by multiple channels, which there is likely not.
Latency has nothing to do with how many packets you send at once. It doesn't matter if it's sending one packet, two packets or fifty at a time. That's not to say the net result isn't a decrease in transfer time, but the RTT is going to be the same.
As gigabit ethernet is already full duplex, I fail to see how adding additional ethernet cables to a setup would reduce latency to any significant degree, unless your environment was previously suffering from a performance issue of some kind... :) *shrug* Maybe I am missing something here?
May be the industry should move faster to NBase-T; 2.5Gbps / 5Gbps and thinking about 10Gbps on prosumer / SME Network instead?
They say 802.11ax will substantially improve real world single client performance, which i hope it is true because as the article has shown, we aren't anywhere near 1Gbps Real world WiFi speed yet.
I would love to see more reasonably-priced 10GBASE-T equipment. It's already not too bad from a prosumer standpoint. There would be little point to developing 2.5GBASE-T or 5GBASE-T at this point, though, since 10GBASE-T has been available for nearly a decade now.
The idea for Base-T is that with a new controller, ( Router , NAS, and your computer ) You could get 2.5 / 5Gbps from an CAT-5e depending on Cable quality and length. For most home users I don't see why they can't achieve 5Gbps unless you live in a castle size home.
My problem is that by the time Base-T standardise and widespread in consumer it will be 2018+. Why are we not forward thinking enough to have 10Gbps on the same controller as well? So it will negotiate the best transfer speed for that cable. I am sure for a lot of SME, and Home, their cables are decent and length are short enough to go 10Gbps.
By 2018, enterprises will have moved to 25G over copper, so the 10G parts might get cheaper as they try to milk the last revenue out of their 10G switches and NICs. The 25/50/100G ports are already in the market, but you need a PCIe3 x16 to handle 100G, along with interrupt steering to distribute the packets to multiple cores.
I would think working MU-MIMO might alter the situation a bit. As you can see, we do get almost 1 Gbps with the 3x3 dual-radio configuration and link aggregation does help there.
Also, there is the matter of Qualcomm Atheros 4x4 routers that I am working on right now. They might be able to reach multi-gigabit throughput.
@plesk: Couldn't agree more on the fantasy land comment.
Their solution is a solution to the marketing problem--that their inflated marketing numbers have now outstripped the maximum one cat5e cable can provide. So they aggregate so that it's not theoretically impossible for their inflated marketing numbers to be correct.
It's like "aggregating" two 64-bit CPUs so that you can claim your CPU is 128-bit. Which is useful in the real world for...precisely nothing.
Oh dear, have you seen the prices of Cisco nbaseT switches (or as they call them - mgig)?
The enterprise price is bad enough at a fairly large discount. The one off price would stagger you. And yes, they will come down, but I have no idea when.
1024 QAM seems not be working. Do we have a review or test of the efficiency of increasing spatial streams? I once tested my Nexus5 with a speed test and I remember having it around 300 to 320 mbps speeds which is pretty close to the theoretical 433 mbps speed and not far from the 400 to 500 mbps actual speeds of 3 spatial streams.
Yeah, 1024-QAM was not working irrespective of where I placed the bridging router. I believe Tim @ SmallNetBuilder was unable to make it work too. Admittedly, it requires almost ideal conditions to kick in, but, I think Netgear / Broadcom has plenty to fix in the firmware.
I really hate to break into comments on something else here, but there's nowhere else to really express my frustration.
I've been seeing, and reading, a lot of reviews here during December, and I'm still waiting for the review of the ipad Pro, which came out some time ago now, and was promised for December. Well, here we are, and it's the last day in December, and where is it? Quite frankly, I've seen reviews of more than a few trivial devices that few people will be interested in, going by the small number of comments on them. I don't ever remember a review taking so long to come out, particularly since the site has has a unit, and came out with some tested specs over a month ago!
I'd like to know what the problem is here, as every other site has had their reviews in over a month ago, including some good, in depth ones. What's the excuse for the hangup? People here, whether they want Apple's products, or don't want them, like to read the reviews, and comment.
Ahem. That's NOT a review. It's a preview (says so in the title) with a couple of benchmarks.. And if you'd even bother reading the preview, it specifically says in the end of pg2: "Anyhow, we’ll be back later with a full review of the iPad Pro, including the pros and cons of Apple’s first large-format, productivity-oriented tablet, and a full breakdown of the A9X SoC. So until then stay tuned."
I disagree dave, the reviews used to be worth waiting for but now they are seriously biased and sales oriented. Honestly purch has turned this into whole site into a viral marketing platform. Recent lame reviews:
-The ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ no testing of triple m.2 performance -gigabyte-z170x-gaming-g1 : no quad SLI or thunderbolt tests
And surprise surprise we have issues with this board already:
Now to be fair gigabyte is aware of the issues and will almost certainly fix them, but the point is if AT had simply tried plugging in a few different memory modules, they would have discovered the board has problems with XMP profiles.
But they didnt check. They didnt check basic memory compatibility. like wtf.
And they didn't test out quad SLI, even though its advertised in the article title. I am sorry to be so negative but im going to keep posting these comments in hopes AT cleans up their act, it's getting ridiculous.
The iPad pro review you are waiting for so desperately is going to come out overwhelmingly positive, and skip over the fact that the thing is too big, isn't able to increase productivity (except certain scanarios with graphic artists) and requires you to charge the 100 dollar pencil from the port in the bottom, making the device completely unusable, or storable while the pencil is charging.
If you want to know what an iPad pro is like, it's EXACTLY the same as an ipad2 with a bigger screen and an awesome, overpriced stylus that has no eraser and is a facepalm to charge.
Just getting photos into an editing app on iOS is such a PITA, and you wind up with mutiple copies in your camera roll and the app itself etc. Organizing is a nightmare, and the only way around it would be to use icloud photos, which you have to pay for.
By the time you get an image loaded and start mucking about with the stylus, buddy next to you on a 2012 mid level PC has imported, tagged, organized, retouched 500+ photos (using sync settings) in lightroom and is about to go have his lunch break, it’s rediculous. Ph and he backup up the catalog, in case a problem occured.
The fact, that even loading a camera raw file onto an ipad converts it to jpeg, is a fail right there.
The device is supposed to be for content creation and editing, but you cant even choose an export format or edit a master file directly.
Can anyone here point out a negative Apple review posted on this site ever???
What a bunch of BS from you here. If you don't like a review, it's biased. Little minds think that way, particularly if it's a review of a company's products that you've decided you don't like, even if you know almost nothing useful about them.
That opinion of yours just shows your own strong biases and negativity.
I should have also pointed out that s it's pretty obvious that you've never even used the device, as you don't seem to understand it, or how people use styluses.
Possibly, you should go on a number of artist sites and see the reviews there. You won't see one bad one. No real user of a stylus cares about an eraser function on the back of a stylus, because it's more trouble reversing the stylus, twice, than tapping the eraser function in the software, where you will also likely want to modify it for the erasing you're doing at that time.
You also don't know anything about how you charge the Pencil. Apple includes an adapter that can plug into any Lightning cable to charge the device from any standard charger with a USB input. The ability to plug the Pencil into the iPad Pro for 15 seconds for 30 minutes is a convienience for when you're somewhere where there is no place to plug a recharger into. It's been praised as an ingenious solution.
Getting photos into the device isn't difficult, and can be done in a number of ways.
Admit it, you're just another person who dislikes Apple for some personally obnoxious reason.
Dude I don't hate Apple, I own a 6s iPad 2 Mac mini, MacBook Air and 2 Thunderbolt displays. My rant is directly targeted at At's failure to do basic testing anymore and just read the script the sponsor sends them... I went on about Apple because buddy brought it up, and yeah I tried editing on the new iPad, brought some test images from d7200 to the local Mac store...fundamentally there's is no diff from iPad 2. Same software, larger screen, slightly faster. Like I said I can do 50 photos in Lightroom, catalogued, sorted and retouched and most importantly backed up... in the same amount of time to do maybe 5 on an iPad pro.
Now let's talk exporting.... Could you imagine exporting say 200+ photos in various sizes/formats on an iPad? This as an extremely common thing for a photographer / web developer to do
it would take 8-12hrs on an iOS device. Lightroom, one click, walk away, and 5 minutes later done.
Point is Apple missed the target audience, it's supposed to be for professionals but it slows you down and doesn't offer any advantages except portability. And the pencil charging???? Jobs would have fired cook on the spot face palm central..same as the new battery case lol
Whoop de doo...go onto your ipad pro, right now. USB3 and pcie storage dont do anything to solve the fundamental problem: IOS is content consumption and delivery platform, end of story.
Pic your favorite photo editing app, id recommend Pixelmator, enlight, vsco, or snapseed. Great apps... all of em. Now export those files to ready to print 300DPI 4x6, 5x7, 10x8 jpegs.
See you in an hour.
OK done?
Now send them to the printer (easy, just email etc). Now Go pick em up
...hey wait....
why dont these pictures look like they do on my ipad Pro.
Cuz you didn't use the correct color space, and didnt retouch the photos using your local printers profile, so the colors just dont match bruh.
Apple forgot the pros, when they made the ipad pro.
Right now all the apple lovers are saying:
"god that dsumanik is so dumb my ipad pro is the best tablet ever its amazing....oh damn new update on angry bird lets check it out...OMG its so amazing on this big screen"
...2 hrs later posts on anandtech:
"dsumanik you are just dumb, dont you have a life, you just are an apple hater and a stupid ninny boo boo head and the apple pencil is amazing and beats the surface pro any day"
To be fair, most of his rant is true, but degrades into an Apple hate diatribe at the end. The "OMG QUAD SLI!" Motherboard review, with no trace of SLI test was roundly criticized. The excuse was "well, we don't have four video cards", fair enough I guess, but something you'd expect from an amateur blogger. Why even bother reviewing a $500 motherboard that only justifies its existence by having quad SLI if you can't test it? If the manufacturer wants you to review it, demand the necessary equipment to make it worth doing.
@dave_the_nerd: "The guy who does the NAS and Networking reviews isn't the same guy(s) who do the mobile device reviews. Or the GPU reviews, for that matter."
Nor would you want them to be. Now what you should be asking is what legitimate reason could exist that would delay the review. Could be the author was sick. Perhaps there were issues with the test selection. Also, it could very well be that their initial results didn't match up the larger tech community and rather than just post as is, they set out to find out why.
@dave_the_nerd: "Anandtech reviews are usually worth waiting for, regardless." Only the ones that you actually wait for. ;')
"I've been seeing, and reading, a lot of reviews here during December, and I'm still waiting for the review of the ipad Pro, which came out some time ago now, and was promised for December. Well, here we are, and it's the last day in December, and where is it?"
And that is a perfectly reasonable critique to make; we haven't been able to get it out nearly as quickly as we had hoped. Suffice it to say, we had planned to have the iPad Pro review out this week. However things didn't work out like Josh and I wanted, and as a result it wasn't possible to complete it in time.
At this point it's a matter of days. If we can't get it out the Monday before CES then you'll see it the week afterwards. But either way you'll see it. We've put a lot of work into this one, and I want to give you guys a review worth waiting for.
Hey, thank you for taking the time to do this review. This is good info and it's given me things to think about when I upgrade my network in the middle of the year.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions, at least with this hardware, that wireless AC at the highest end is still not ready to replace my Cat5e cables snaked through the house.
I love my fast connection to my NAS, router, and other clients without high latency and jittery speeds.
The other thing to keep in mind is that all 802.11 based standards are half-duplex and all these routers claims of bandwidth is the sum of the total system bandwidth in both directions. But in reality the bandwidth is split 50/50 between the transmit and receive sides of the time division multiplexing. So in any one direction transfer the maximum theoretical throughput of a pair of wireless devices is 50% of the negotiated link speed.
Basically if wired lan was advertised the same as wifi routers, then your 1 gigabit cat5e would be marketed as "2 gigabits".
Wow, I was about the mention the same thing. I did a lot of reading last year on Wi-Fi and standards that I came to know of this half-duplex operation as I am perplexed why multi-gigabit Wi-Fi don't come close LAN cabling. Even uglier are the spatial streams which has diminishing returns. A second spatial stream, if I'm correct, is around 50% improvement and the third stream is around 20 to 30%.
You make a valid point about the difference between full and half-duplex operation.
You miss though that ethernet was originally shared and half-duplex, and so a 10baseT or 10base2 network segment shared 10mbps among all connected devices. This bandwidth was measured at the PHY (physical) layer, and didn't take into account the overhead imposed the collision detection and avoidance MAC (media access control). During the the rise in full-duplex NICs and switches starting in the mid-1990s, bi-directional communication was still a selling point.
When WiFi arrived, it was specced similarly to early ethernet. The quoted speeds were based on the maximum available PHY rate, and ignored the overhead imposed by other layers of the wireless stack. This pattern held until 802.11ac, when the quoted datarates were at the MAC layer, and arrived with efficiency improvements in the MAC. However, they still are half-duplex.
While I agree that the distinction between the full-duplex norms of most wired networking and the half-duplex norms of WiFi are important to consider. I think you've manage to both under and overstate the implications when it comes to WiFi.
Also, your comment on shared bandwidth between two wireless stations connecting through the same WiFi router/access point should probably acknowledge that things change straightforward once multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) becomes better supported and adopted, particularly since the article you are commenting on is about MU-MIMO capable hardware.
Add to your half-duplex wireless hates, air listening times, back-off times, re-tranmissions, noisy environments (I had 57 viewable networks from the apartment in Copenhagen), and more all lead to increased latency. So I gave up on 802.11g long ago... 2.4GHz was saturated.
My two C3750G switches are hard-wiring my house just fine, without LACP or PAGP, my etherchannels are hard coded as ON.
But I actually still like this product - I've seen more than enough small business run on non-enterprise gear (NOT my decision), and so having etherchannels available to a NAS makes sense - for a storage solution that might be under quite some load with a dozen or so users.
And wait until DD-WRT gets their hands on it, you might get some port security etc too!
I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit in the US regarding the lies about wireless speeds that router companies peddle. "5.3Gbps WiFi Speeds"... I doubt Netgear has ever even seen that in their own testing, and I doubt anyone ever will.
Maybe one day wireless speeds won't be "up to" with the average maximum throughput being 20% of what the manufacturer claims... and maybe I'll fart butterflies. Until then, I'm sticking with wired Ethernet - it may be an old standard, and a pain, but at least it delivers.
Wireless speeds will never be as fast as wired speeds. It adds a whole encode/encrypt/transmit/receive/decrypt/decode process to every block of data sent. Besides, 5 Ghz is a joke for wall penetration. Nice of the FCC to sell the 3.5 Ghz band to sprint so they could bury it, wasn't it?
5 GHz not going through more than 2 walls reliably is a feature! Makes it much easier to implement wireless in schools where you need to worry more about capacity than coverage/range.
With 2.4 GHz, you need to futz around with power levels and channel overlap and whatnot to support dense AP layouts. Sticking an AP into every other classroom works, but requires a lot time to make it work well.
With 5 GHz, you just stick an AP into every other classroom, and you're done. There's very little overlap between APs (even between floors), even at 100% transmit power. And you get more, wider channels to play with to boot.
So why hasn't everyone tried to move 10GB connections more mainstream? Is it really that hard to build stable hardware for it or is everyone just trying to milk the top as long as possible?
The cheapest I have found is a QNAP TS-563 with an add-on card ($800 before HDDs), and a Netgear ProSAFE S3300-28X ($500). Seems like assembly line technology should be able to make anything cheaper after 4-5 years of recouping the R&D expenses.
The problem is that 10Gbps links are very power hungry, for the vast majority of even prosumer use cases 1Gbit will be more than fast enough since 99% of a user's traffic is to/from the internet and few people have faster than gigabit home connections. So why spend the power on a single component of the PC (NIC) when almost nobody will use it at even a gigabit, much less 10Gbit?
My take away is that even the wired speeds are marred with limitation. No Thank you. I don't want to have to read the manual for which port does actually deliver what is advertised. At least color code and label the ports.
Furthermore, I wished any network gear would include a bufferbloat test.
I bought one of these to replace a hodge-podge of router/ap/ap and it replaced all of them and has great coverage. Speeds are a lot faster than the Netgear N900 it replaced and it has coverage not only of the house (3800sqft, 1.25 story) but the entire acre lot. I couldn't find one device at this price to do that and am happy with it. Not to mention the Genie software, which is still one of the easiest to use. I bought the CM600 Cable Modem and switched it in and out with my Motorola Surfboard SB6141 and it was not even close. I was on the phone with the Cox tech when I was switching back and forth because he was interested in possibly getting one for the 24x8 channel bonding. I had stuff downloading all over the house (2 laptops, an Ipad, Netflix on 2 TVs, and an Iphone downstairs and a Sony 4k server, Netflix, my PC, a surface 3 and my Lumina upstairs) and the CM600 was much faster. Anecdotal, but did it 4 times with the same downloads in a row and results were similar each time. It feels good to have the network DONE. For now, yeah.
You hit the nail on the head. It actually is better than previous generations. The issue occurs when marketing departments get hold of things. The real world advantages are difficult to explain to the average consumer i.e. the people NetGear products are generally aimed at. So rather than try to explain it, its easier to just slap a bigger number on it because consumers tend to buy into the ploy that a bigger number is better and "faster". The bigger number is kind of/sort of semi-useful in saying that "our new router is better than our old router" but pretty useless as far as comparing routers of different brands or even slightly different speced routers within a brand.
On the other hand, most consumers won't know the difference anyway. If you are using your router primarily for connecting to the Internet and your connection is (as mine is) 60 Mb, then it won't matter how many Gb of throughput the router has. And its only with the cable company's relatively recent upgrade from 30 Mb to 60 Mb that the connection was faster than could be delivered by 802.11G. Sure, all of you smart enough to be having this discussion in the first place will know the difference. But 99% of the people who buy NetGear equipment aimed at the home will not know the difference.
I did something similar to what you did, but 2 years ago with the R7000 Nighthawk. There were some issues in the beginning, but everything was fixed after a few firmware updates, and I've been very happy with the speed and coverage. I am using a SB6141 modem, which I have no complaints about - my last SamKnows report shows I'm averaging 166Mbps speed - but if I need a new modem, the CM600 looks awesome.
So I've never hit any of the advertised Wifi speeds, but the bottom line is that I have 25+ devices in the house, and these routers handle it much better than my old Netgear WNDR3400, in terms of coverage and speeds when stressed.
The advertised/displayed numbers are OSI layer 1 link rates which should not be confused with throughput on any of the higher layers. WiFi has tremendous overhead on the physical layer compared to Ethernet, primarily for error correction since broadcasting into the open air is extremely noisy but also for other reasons. For 802.11a/b/g the best you could expect your layer 2 throughput to be was around 40% of the layer 1 link rate, for 802.11n/ac it's more like 50-60%.
Now in some of the cases you were getting extremely low performance and in other cases slightly low, but the review shows a major lack of understanding and it further spreads common confusion. It is important to make the distinction between the advertised layer 1 link rates and throughput achieved at higher layers so that people understand ALL WiFi IS ADVERTISED THIS WAY and to only expect ~1/2 of what is advertised.
I have to admit that I haven't really put much thought into faster local networking since 10 Mbit/s hubs were a thing. There was a little concern back in the dark days of 802.11b and 11 Mbit/s over wireless, but since 802.11g equipment became an inexpensive standard, it's never really crossed my mind to even worry about network plumbing unless a NIC was acting up or I needed to figure out a model number to find drivers. Of course, I've been aware of new standards, but routers are something that are so infrequently replaced that faster networking has just sort of creeped along behind the scenes as I get a new laptop or buy a new router from my ISP. I couldn't even tell you what the maximum bandwidth of my current router is without turning it over to find the model and then looking up the specs online. It has a lot to do with how much my demand on computers has waned over the years. I no longer have an interest in running a local server or even a NAS box. If I need to save something or move files around (a much reduced thing with only a couple of laptops and a phone that all run operating systems that don't share a common OS between the three of them), I just use a thumb drive, an SD card, or plug in a micro USB cable in the case of the phone. It's still interesting to see the technology moving along behind the scenes even if it doesn't really matter to me one way or another as long as I can view a web page or watch the occasional streamed video.
I hated this router for $400. The first one crashed on a firmware upgrade and the technical support said to return it. The second one worked just OK (no better then my Apple Airport Extreme N router), then after a month the 2.4GHz band dropped and never came back, hardware reset could not get it going, So I returned it. I'm back to my Airport Extreme N with faster speeds and stability. MY opinion is stay clear of this router. Wait the ethernet connections transferred files 3 times faster so that was good, but wireless performance was NO WAY worth $400. Thank you for reading
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blaktron - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Using LACP direct from router to NAS is such a damn waste. If you put an enterprise switch in the middle of that you would get more than a 2x latency improvement to both your internet and files when using multiple clients on the network.Right now I have a 3 channel LACP to my vHost and a 2 channel to my router with a Procurve in the middle and its incredible how low latency you get on requests compared to single channel setups.
cdillon - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
LACP is going to do absolutely nothing for you in regards to a noticeable latency decrease. The link bit-time is still exactly the same as without LACP, you only gain parallelism. Even if it did decrease your already sub-millisecond LAN latency, that would amount to squat when your internet connection already has at least a few milliseconds of latency. You might go from 15.1 ms to 15.05 ms... again, that's only if it did anything for you at all.sor - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
I think what he means is that you'd want wired clients for the NAS, instead of forcing all access through the wireless router. At least, that's the only way I can think of to make his comment remotely sensible.cdillon - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
He mentions having LACP to the *router*.sor - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Right, and he says to put a switch between them to serve other clients. This device is a router and wireless hub.blaktron - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Yeah, so you get a latency decrease by serving two packets at a time. You get the biggest benefit from using srv-io and multiple vm servers off a lacp array. The setup described above still has a single channel bottleneck unless there's an internal switch attaching the wireless module by multiple channels, which there is likely not.joenathan - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
That isn't how latency works. Two packets at once would be throughput.lowtolerance - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Latency has nothing to do with how many packets you send at once. It doesn't matter if it's sending one packet, two packets or fifty at a time. That's not to say the net result isn't a decrease in transfer time, but the RTT is going to be the same.FaaR - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
As gigabit ethernet is already full duplex, I fail to see how adding additional ethernet cables to a setup would reduce latency to any significant degree, unless your environment was previously suffering from a performance issue of some kind... :) *shrug* Maybe I am missing something here?TexelTech - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
I dont believe it has anything to do with latency, more like throughput.Dunkurs1987 - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
T Think Synology have a competition here with RT1900ac router:http://www.span.com/product/Synology-Wireless-Rout...
iwod - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
May be the industry should move faster to NBase-T; 2.5Gbps / 5Gbps and thinking about 10Gbps on prosumer / SME Network instead?They say 802.11ax will substantially improve real world single client performance, which i hope it is true because as the article has shown, we aren't anywhere near 1Gbps Real world WiFi speed yet.
cdillon - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
I would love to see more reasonably-priced 10GBASE-T equipment. It's already not too bad from a prosumer standpoint. There would be little point to developing 2.5GBASE-T or 5GBASE-T at this point, though, since 10GBASE-T has been available for nearly a decade now.iwod - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
The idea for Base-T is that with a new controller, ( Router , NAS, and your computer ) You could get 2.5 / 5Gbps from an CAT-5e depending on Cable quality and length. For most home users I don't see why they can't achieve 5Gbps unless you live in a castle size home.My problem is that by the time Base-T standardise and widespread in consumer it will be 2018+. Why are we not forward thinking enough to have 10Gbps on the same controller as well? So it will negotiate the best transfer speed for that cable. I am sure for a lot of SME, and Home, their cables are decent and length are short enough to go 10Gbps.
jhh - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
By 2018, enterprises will have moved to 25G over copper, so the 10G parts might get cheaper as they try to milk the last revenue out of their 10G switches and NICs. The 25/50/100G ports are already in the market, but you need a PCIe3 x16 to handle 100G, along with interrupt steering to distribute the packets to multiple cores.p1esk - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Exactly. Real world WiFi speeds are nowhere near 1Gbps. This link aggregation is really a solution to the problem from a fantasy land.ganeshts - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
I would think working MU-MIMO might alter the situation a bit. As you can see, we do get almost 1 Gbps with the 3x3 dual-radio configuration and link aggregation does help there.Also, there is the matter of Qualcomm Atheros 4x4 routers that I am working on right now. They might be able to reach multi-gigabit throughput.
magreen - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
@plesk: Couldn't agree more on the fantasy land comment.Their solution is a solution to the marketing problem--that their inflated marketing numbers have now outstripped the maximum one cat5e cable can provide. So they aggregate so that it's not theoretically impossible for their inflated marketing numbers to be correct.
It's like "aggregating" two 64-bit CPUs so that you can claim your CPU is 128-bit. Which is useful in the real world for...precisely nothing.
keithjeff - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
Oh dear, have you seen the prices of Cisco nbaseT switches (or as they call them - mgig)?The enterprise price is bad enough at a fairly large discount. The one off price would stagger you. And yes, they will come down, but I have no idea when.
Cheers,
zodiacfml - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
1024 QAM seems not be working. Do we have a review or test of the efficiency of increasing spatial streams? I once tested my Nexus5 with a speed test and I remember having it around 300 to 320 mbps speeds which is pretty close to the theoretical 433 mbps speed and not far from the 400 to 500 mbps actual speeds of 3 spatial streams.ganeshts - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Yeah, 1024-QAM was not working irrespective of where I placed the bridging router. I believe Tim @ SmallNetBuilder was unable to make it work too. Admittedly, it requires almost ideal conditions to kick in, but, I think Netgear / Broadcom has plenty to fix in the firmware.melgross - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
I really hate to break into comments on something else here, but there's nowhere else to really express my frustration.I've been seeing, and reading, a lot of reviews here during December, and I'm still waiting for the review of the ipad Pro, which came out some time ago now, and was promised for December. Well, here we are, and it's the last day in December, and where is it? Quite frankly, I've seen reviews of more than a few trivial devices that few people will be interested in, going by the small number of comments on them. I don't ever remember a review taking so long to come out, particularly since the site has has a unit, and came out with some tested specs over a month ago!
I'd like to know what the problem is here, as every other site has had their reviews in over a month ago, including some good, in depth ones. What's the excuse for the hangup? People here, whether they want Apple's products, or don't want them, like to read the reviews, and comment.
Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
What the hell are you talking about? They did an ipad pro review LAST MONTH:http://www.anandtech.com/show/9780/taking-notes-wi...
lagittaja - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Ahem. That's NOT a review. It's a preview (says so in the title) with a couple of benchmarks..And if you'd even bother reading the preview, it specifically says in the end of pg2:
"Anyhow, we’ll be back later with a full review of the iPad Pro, including the pros and cons of Apple’s first large-format, productivity-oriented tablet, and a full breakdown of the A9X SoC. So until then stay tuned."
dsumanik - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
I disagree dave, the reviews used to be worth waiting for but now they are seriously biased and sales oriented. Honestly purch has turned this into whole site into a viral marketing platform. Recent lame reviews:-The ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ no testing of triple m.2 performance
-gigabyte-z170x-gaming-g1 : no quad SLI or thunderbolt tests
And surprise surprise we have issues with this board already:
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/62038-ga-z170...
Now to be fair gigabyte is aware of the issues and will almost certainly fix them, but the point is if AT had simply tried plugging in a few different memory modules, they would have discovered the board has problems with XMP profiles.
But they didnt check. They didnt check basic memory compatibility. like wtf.
And they didn't test out quad SLI, even though its advertised in the article title. I am sorry to be so negative but im going to keep posting these comments in hopes AT cleans up their act, it's getting ridiculous.
The iPad pro review you are waiting for so desperately is going to come out overwhelmingly positive, and skip over the fact that the thing is too big, isn't able to increase productivity (except certain scanarios with graphic artists) and requires you to charge the 100 dollar pencil from the port in the bottom, making the device completely unusable, or storable while the pencil is charging.
If you want to know what an iPad pro is like, it's EXACTLY the same as an ipad2 with a bigger screen and an awesome, overpriced stylus that has no eraser and is a facepalm to charge.
Just getting photos into an editing app on iOS is such a PITA, and you wind up with mutiple copies in your camera roll and the app itself etc. Organizing is a nightmare, and the only way around it would be to use icloud photos, which you have to pay for.
By the time you get an image loaded and start mucking about with the stylus, buddy next to you on a 2012 mid level PC has imported, tagged, organized, retouched 500+ photos (using sync settings) in lightroom and is about to go have his lunch break, it’s rediculous. Ph and he backup up the catalog, in case a problem occured.
The fact, that even loading a camera raw file onto an ipad converts it to jpeg, is a fail right there.
The device is supposed to be for content creation and editing, but you cant even choose an export format or edit a master file directly.
Can anyone here point out a negative Apple review posted on this site ever???
Just one.
melgross - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
What a bunch of BS from you here. If you don't like a review, it's biased. Little minds think that way, particularly if it's a review of a company's products that you've decided you don't like, even if you know almost nothing useful about them.That opinion of yours just shows your own strong biases and negativity.
melgross - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
I should have also pointed out that s it's pretty obvious that you've never even used the device, as you don't seem to understand it, or how people use styluses.Possibly, you should go on a number of artist sites and see the reviews there. You won't see one bad one. No real user of a stylus cares about an eraser function on the back of a stylus, because it's more trouble reversing the stylus, twice, than tapping the eraser function in the software, where you will also likely want to modify it for the erasing you're doing at that time.
You also don't know anything about how you charge the Pencil. Apple includes an adapter that can plug into any Lightning cable to charge the device from any standard charger with a USB input. The ability to plug the Pencil into the iPad Pro for 15 seconds for 30 minutes is a convienience for when you're somewhere where there is no place to plug a recharger into. It's been praised as an ingenious solution.
Getting photos into the device isn't difficult, and can be done in a number of ways.
Admit it, you're just another person who dislikes Apple for some personally obnoxious reason.
dsumanik - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Dude I don't hate Apple, I own a 6s iPad 2 Mac mini, MacBook Air and 2 Thunderbolt displays. My rant is directly targeted at At's failure to do basic testing anymore and just read the script the sponsor sends them... I went on about Apple because buddy brought it up, and yeah I tried editing on the new iPad, brought some test images from d7200 to the local Mac store...fundamentally there's is no diff from iPad 2. Same software, larger screen, slightly faster. Like I said I can do 50 photos in Lightroom, catalogued, sorted and retouched and most importantly backed up... in the same amount of time to do maybe 5 on an iPad pro.Now let's talk exporting.... Could you imagine exporting say 200+ photos in various sizes/formats on an iPad? This as an extremely common thing for a photographer / web developer to do
it would take 8-12hrs on an iOS device. Lightroom, one click, walk away, and 5 minutes later done.
Point is Apple missed the target audience, it's supposed to be for professionals but it slows you down and doesn't offer any advantages except portability. And the pencil charging???? Jobs would have fired cook on the spot face palm central..same as the new battery case lol
NetMage - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
Now do the same thing with your PC in the middle of a forest, or in your living room. A bit slower to drive hours to do those 50 images?Just because it isn't for you, doesn't mean it isn't much better for others. Same with the battery case.
dsumanik - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Did some digging netmage is a paid-for commenter hired by Apple PR.Honestly.... defending the apple battery case bud? At least TRY not to be obvious.
MrX8503 - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
The iPad Pro's lighting connector is USB3 and the storage is PCIe and NVMe.dsumanik - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Whoop de doo...go onto your ipad pro, right now. USB3 and pcie storage dont do anything to solve the fundamental problem: IOS is content consumption and delivery platform, end of story.Pic your favorite photo editing app, id recommend Pixelmator, enlight, vsco, or snapseed. Great apps... all of em. Now export those files to ready to print 300DPI 4x6, 5x7, 10x8 jpegs.
See you in an hour.
OK done?
Now send them to the printer (easy, just email etc). Now Go pick em up
...hey wait....
why dont these pictures look like they do on my ipad Pro.
Cuz you didn't use the correct color space, and didnt retouch the photos using your local printers profile, so the colors just dont match bruh.
Apple forgot the pros, when they made the ipad pro.
Right now all the apple lovers are saying:
"god that dsumanik is so dumb my ipad pro is the best tablet ever its amazing....oh damn new update on angry bird lets check it out...OMG its so amazing on this big screen"
...2 hrs later posts on anandtech:
"dsumanik you are just dumb, dont you have a life, you just are an apple hater and a stupid ninny boo boo head and the apple pencil is amazing and beats the surface pro any day"
Actually let's be honest:
you're all still exporting!
BAHAHAHAH
sor - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
To be fair, most of his rant is true, but degrades into an Apple hate diatribe at the end. The "OMG QUAD SLI!" Motherboard review, with no trace of SLI test was roundly criticized. The excuse was "well, we don't have four video cards", fair enough I guess, but something you'd expect from an amateur blogger. Why even bother reviewing a $500 motherboard that only justifies its existence by having quad SLI if you can't test it? If the manufacturer wants you to review it, demand the necessary equipment to make it worth doing.melgross - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
No, that's not the review. Maybe you should have read what it said before jumping to conclusions so that you could try to refute me.Makaveli - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Here's an idea keep your off topic apple crap out of a netgear router review please and thank you!VictorBd - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Rude.dave_the_nerd - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
The guy who does the NAS and Networking reviews isn't the same guy(s) who do the mobile device reviews. Or the GPU reviews, for that matter.Anandtech reviews are usually worth waiting for, regardless.
BurntMyBacon - Monday, January 11, 2016 - link
@dave_the_nerd: "The guy who does the NAS and Networking reviews isn't the same guy(s) who do the mobile device reviews. Or the GPU reviews, for that matter."Nor would you want them to be. Now what you should be asking is what legitimate reason could exist that would delay the review. Could be the author was sick. Perhaps there were issues with the test selection. Also, it could very well be that their initial results didn't match up the larger tech community and rather than just post as is, they set out to find out why.
@dave_the_nerd: "Anandtech reviews are usually worth waiting for, regardless."
Only the ones that you actually wait for. ;')
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
"I've been seeing, and reading, a lot of reviews here during December, and I'm still waiting for the review of the ipad Pro, which came out some time ago now, and was promised for December. Well, here we are, and it's the last day in December, and where is it?"And that is a perfectly reasonable critique to make; we haven't been able to get it out nearly as quickly as we had hoped. Suffice it to say, we had planned to have the iPad Pro review out this week. However things didn't work out like Josh and I wanted, and as a result it wasn't possible to complete it in time.
At this point it's a matter of days. If we can't get it out the Monday before CES then you'll see it the week afterwards. But either way you'll see it. We've put a lot of work into this one, and I want to give you guys a review worth waiting for.
c0y0te - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Thanks Ryan. I have been waiting for the iPad Pro review as well.Ertaz - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Hey, thank you for taking the time to do this review. This is good info and it's given me things to think about when I upgrade my network in the middle of the year.creed3020 - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Thanks for confirming my suspicions, at least with this hardware, that wireless AC at the highest end is still not ready to replace my Cat5e cables snaked through the house.I love my fast connection to my NAS, router, and other clients without high latency and jittery speeds.
IndianaKrom - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
The other thing to keep in mind is that all 802.11 based standards are half-duplex and all these routers claims of bandwidth is the sum of the total system bandwidth in both directions. But in reality the bandwidth is split 50/50 between the transmit and receive sides of the time division multiplexing. So in any one direction transfer the maximum theoretical throughput of a pair of wireless devices is 50% of the negotiated link speed.Basically if wired lan was advertised the same as wifi routers, then your 1 gigabit cat5e would be marketed as "2 gigabits".
zodiacfml - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Wow, I was about the mention the same thing. I did a lot of reading last year on Wi-Fi and standards that I came to know of this half-duplex operation as I am perplexed why multi-gigabit Wi-Fi don't come close LAN cabling. Even uglier are the spatial streams which has diminishing returns. A second spatial stream, if I'm correct, is around 50% improvement and the third stream is around 20 to 30%.easp - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
You make a valid point about the difference between full and half-duplex operation.You miss though that ethernet was originally shared and half-duplex, and so a 10baseT or 10base2 network segment shared 10mbps among all connected devices. This bandwidth was measured at the PHY (physical) layer, and didn't take into account the overhead imposed the collision detection and avoidance MAC (media access control). During the the rise in full-duplex NICs and switches starting in the mid-1990s, bi-directional communication was still a selling point.
When WiFi arrived, it was specced similarly to early ethernet. The quoted speeds were based on the maximum available PHY rate, and ignored the overhead imposed by other layers of the wireless stack. This pattern held until 802.11ac, when the quoted datarates were at the MAC layer, and arrived with efficiency improvements in the MAC. However, they still are half-duplex.
While I agree that the distinction between the full-duplex norms of most wired networking and the half-duplex norms of WiFi are important to consider. I think you've manage to both under and overstate the implications when it comes to WiFi.
Also, your comment on shared bandwidth between two wireless stations connecting through the same WiFi router/access point should probably acknowledge that things change straightforward once multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) becomes better supported and adopted, particularly since the article you are commenting on is about MU-MIMO capable hardware.
easp - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
Derp. I meant to cut my second-to-last paragraph.Notmyusualid - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Add to your half-duplex wireless hates, air listening times, back-off times, re-tranmissions, noisy environments (I had 57 viewable networks from the apartment in Copenhagen), and more all lead to increased latency. So I gave up on 802.11g long ago... 2.4GHz was saturated.My two C3750G switches are hard-wiring my house just fine, without LACP or PAGP, my etherchannels are hard coded as ON.
But I actually still like this product - I've seen more than enough small business run on non-enterprise gear (NOT my decision), and so having etherchannels available to a NAS makes sense - for a storage solution that might be under quite some load with a dozen or so users.
And wait until DD-WRT gets their hands on it, you might get some port security etc too!
michaelag - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
"On the other hand, 802.11c enables router manufacturers to market multi-gigabit Wi-Fi."Correction, "802.11ac"?
ganeshts - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Thanks for pointing out. Fixed the typo.The_Assimilator - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit in the US regarding the lies about wireless speeds that router companies peddle. "5.3Gbps WiFi Speeds"... I doubt Netgear has ever even seen that in their own testing, and I doubt anyone ever will.Maybe one day wireless speeds won't be "up to" with the average maximum throughput being 20% of what the manufacturer claims... and maybe I'll fart butterflies. Until then, I'm sticking with wired Ethernet - it may be an old standard, and a pain, but at least it delivers.
c0y0te - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
Wireless speeds will never be as fast as wired speeds. It adds a whole encode/encrypt/transmit/receive/decrypt/decode process to every block of data sent. Besides, 5 Ghz is a joke for wall penetration. Nice of the FCC to sell the 3.5 Ghz band to sprint so they could bury it, wasn't it?phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link
5 GHz not going through more than 2 walls reliably is a feature! Makes it much easier to implement wireless in schools where you need to worry more about capacity than coverage/range.With 2.4 GHz, you need to futz around with power levels and channel overlap and whatnot to support dense AP layouts. Sticking an AP into every other classroom works, but requires a lot time to make it work well.
With 5 GHz, you just stick an AP into every other classroom, and you're done. There's very little overlap between APs (even between floors), even at 100% transmit power. And you get more, wider channels to play with to boot.
pixelstuff - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - link
So why hasn't everyone tried to move 10GB connections more mainstream? Is it really that hard to build stable hardware for it or is everyone just trying to milk the top as long as possible?The cheapest I have found is a QNAP TS-563 with an add-on card ($800 before HDDs), and a Netgear ProSAFE S3300-28X ($500). Seems like assembly line technology should be able to make anything cheaper after 4-5 years of recouping the R&D expenses.
Reflex - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
The problem is that 10Gbps links are very power hungry, for the vast majority of even prosumer use cases 1Gbit will be more than fast enough since 99% of a user's traffic is to/from the internet and few people have faster than gigabit home connections. So why spend the power on a single component of the PC (NIC) when almost nobody will use it at even a gigabit, much less 10Gbit?Conficio - Friday, January 1, 2016 - link
My take away is that even the wired speeds are marred with limitation. No Thank you. I don't want to have to read the manual for which port does actually deliver what is advertised. At least color code and label the ports.Furthermore, I wished any network gear would include a bufferbloat test.
TheRealAnalogkid - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
I bought one of these to replace a hodge-podge of router/ap/ap and it replaced all of them and has great coverage. Speeds are a lot faster than the Netgear N900 it replaced and it has coverage not only of the house (3800sqft, 1.25 story) but the entire acre lot. I couldn't find one device at this price to do that and am happy with it. Not to mention the Genie software, which is still one of the easiest to use. I bought the CM600 Cable Modem and switched it in and out with my Motorola Surfboard SB6141 and it was not even close. I was on the phone with the Cox tech when I was switching back and forth because he was interested in possibly getting one for the 24x8 channel bonding. I had stuff downloading all over the house (2 laptops, an Ipad, Netflix on 2 TVs, and an Iphone downstairs and a Sony 4k server, Netflix, my PC, a surface 3 and my Lumina upstairs) and the CM600 was much faster. Anecdotal, but did it 4 times with the same downloads in a row and results were similar each time. It feels good to have the network DONE. For now, yeah.Ratman6161 - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
You hit the nail on the head. It actually is better than previous generations. The issue occurs when marketing departments get hold of things. The real world advantages are difficult to explain to the average consumer i.e. the people NetGear products are generally aimed at. So rather than try to explain it, its easier to just slap a bigger number on it because consumers tend to buy into the ploy that a bigger number is better and "faster". The bigger number is kind of/sort of semi-useful in saying that "our new router is better than our old router" but pretty useless as far as comparing routers of different brands or even slightly different speced routers within a brand.On the other hand, most consumers won't know the difference anyway. If you are using your router primarily for connecting to the Internet and your connection is (as mine is) 60 Mb, then it won't matter how many Gb of throughput the router has. And its only with the cable company's relatively recent upgrade from 30 Mb to 60 Mb that the connection was faster than could be delivered by 802.11G. Sure, all of you smart enough to be having this discussion in the first place will know the difference. But 99% of the people who buy NetGear equipment aimed at the home will not know the difference.
kmmatney - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
I did something similar to what you did, but 2 years ago with the R7000 Nighthawk. There were some issues in the beginning, but everything was fixed after a few firmware updates, and I've been very happy with the speed and coverage. I am using a SB6141 modem, which I have no complaints about - my last SamKnows report shows I'm averaging 166Mbps speed - but if I need a new modem, the CM600 looks awesome.So I've never hit any of the advertised Wifi speeds, but the bottom line is that I have 25+ devices in the house, and these routers handle it much better than my old Netgear WNDR3400, in terms of coverage and speeds when stressed.
toyotabedzrock - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
Typical, companies like to use fast parts but not actually connect them to an interface that can allow them to be used at the high speed.phuzi0n - Saturday, January 2, 2016 - link
The advertised/displayed numbers are OSI layer 1 link rates which should not be confused with throughput on any of the higher layers. WiFi has tremendous overhead on the physical layer compared to Ethernet, primarily for error correction since broadcasting into the open air is extremely noisy but also for other reasons. For 802.11a/b/g the best you could expect your layer 2 throughput to be was around 40% of the layer 1 link rate, for 802.11n/ac it's more like 50-60%.Now in some of the cases you were getting extremely low performance and in other cases slightly low, but the review shows a major lack of understanding and it further spreads common confusion. It is important to make the distinction between the advertised layer 1 link rates and throughput achieved at higher layers so that people understand ALL WiFi IS ADVERTISED THIS WAY and to only expect ~1/2 of what is advertised.
Chad - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Just do like I do, if you need super crazy NAS speeds, build your own and attach via Thunderbolt.TheKiwi - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
If it's connected directly by Thunderbolt, it is, by definition, not a NAS. It's a single-user DAS.BrokenCrayons - Monday, January 4, 2016 - link
I have to admit that I haven't really put much thought into faster local networking since 10 Mbit/s hubs were a thing. There was a little concern back in the dark days of 802.11b and 11 Mbit/s over wireless, but since 802.11g equipment became an inexpensive standard, it's never really crossed my mind to even worry about network plumbing unless a NIC was acting up or I needed to figure out a model number to find drivers. Of course, I've been aware of new standards, but routers are something that are so infrequently replaced that faster networking has just sort of creeped along behind the scenes as I get a new laptop or buy a new router from my ISP. I couldn't even tell you what the maximum bandwidth of my current router is without turning it over to find the model and then looking up the specs online. It has a lot to do with how much my demand on computers has waned over the years. I no longer have an interest in running a local server or even a NAS box. If I need to save something or move files around (a much reduced thing with only a couple of laptops and a phone that all run operating systems that don't share a common OS between the three of them), I just use a thumb drive, an SD card, or plug in a micro USB cable in the case of the phone. It's still interesting to see the technology moving along behind the scenes even if it doesn't really matter to me one way or another as long as I can view a web page or watch the occasional streamed video.adamlreed93 - Saturday, January 9, 2016 - link
I hated this router for $400. The first one crashed on a firmware upgrade and the technical support said to return it. The second one worked just OK (no better then my Apple Airport Extreme N router), then after a month the 2.4GHz band dropped and never came back, hardware reset could not get it going, So I returned it. I'm back to my Airport Extreme N with faster speeds and stability. MY opinion is stay clear of this router. Wait the ethernet connections transferred files 3 times faster so that was good, but wireless performance was NO WAY worth $400. Thank you for readingMilliamp - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
We need a 5G ethernet over Cat5 specification for home networking, WiFi access points etc.There is a spec drafted but I don't think many products use it it. I believe a 2.5GE specification has also been created.
tzeleong - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link
Does this mean that there is no benefits if the wifi router is connected to a gigabit switch via link aggregation?