Asus RT-N66U vs. TP-Link TL-WDR3600N for Gaming

[Madmick]

The N66U is the king of 802.11n routers, but considering how this router will be used I'm not certain it's advantages justify the price difference. Chiefly this will be used for gaming on a PS4/PC, and it will also sometimes do double duty as a media router. Here is a hardware.info spec sheet comparison breakdown:
http://us.hardware.info/comparisontable/products/157249-130513

Obviously the greatest difference between the two is the bandwidth of 450Mbps vs. 300Mbps, but I would never broadcast anything that would require anywhere close to either. I understand that this is a theoretical number, and that actual data rates and effective range vary massively between many routers claiming the same numbers. The TV to which this will broadcast is a good 50-60 feet away, and through several walls. The hardware.info sheet above actually lists actually tested data rates, and there you can see the superiority of the Asus. However, here's my thought. Considering the price difference I realized I would be able to buy the TP-Link and their TL-WA850RE range extender. I'm thinking this might actually flip the race and give the TP-Link a stronger effective data rate, and still win the price war ($115 vs. $71).

Otherwise, the greatest advantage of the Asus appears to be the ability to host a VPN server (not a business router, won't use this), and to provide the ability to assign bandwidth to QoS by Mac Address (which shouldn't be an issue because no other devices will be interfering with gaming on this network).

What am I missing? Anything relevant to gaming or basic local media server broadcasting? Could one expect to see any sort of substantial performance difference in gaming (such as lag) on an identical ISP or anything else that can't be put down on a spec sheet? I've heard how great the custom firmware is, but so long as I can achieve a NAT Type 2 I don't really care about spending my days customizing router settings.

Thanks.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

how many walls we talking about? I can see a string signal from my router from the opposite end of the house, but some of my crappier devices can't punch a signal back in the opposite directions.

 

[azazel1024]

I'd ask how many walls as well. I have a WDR3600. Across my house, about 45ft away sitting on my bed, through 3 walls I can get roughly 6-7MB/sec on 2.4GHz 40MHz on my laptop, that works out to roughly 48-56Mbps.

By comparison in the same room as the WDR3600 10ft away I can get 200Mbps on 2.4GHz 40MHz.

Laptop has an Intel 7260ac in it.

If you've got more walls than that, especially with the distance, the connection is going to be seriously pushing it. You can probably still manage it (if I move my WDR3600 to have my 4ft thick masonry chimney in the way, my performance drops to a very slow, but still more or less usable 2-2.5MB/sec, or 16-20Mbps and the connection is NOT shakey, its reliable, just slow).

An extender is probably a pretty good idea with that kind of distance involved for ANY router. Or better yet, use powerline adapters, or run ethernet cable across the house.

Not sure the sites test configuration, but I can vouch for awesome performance on the WDR3600. From a bunch of reviews I have looked at, it is basically the number 1 N600 class router out there for wireless and WAN routing performance, though light on features (as you mentioned, no VPN server). The N66u and the WDR4300 are a bit better if you have a 3:3 client, by virtue of being N900 and N750 class routers.

However, performance at range on the N66u is only slightly better from what I have seen.

By "base" WDR3600 performance measured with my laptop with Intel 7260ac in it is 200Mbps LAN to WLAN on 2.4GHz 40MHz and 204Mbps LAN to WLAN on 5GHz 40MHz. WLAN to LAN is roughly 170Mbps on 2.4GHz and 180Mbps on 5GHz for same room performance. This is actual, real world averaged file transfer performance (using 1GB files).

 

[Madmick]

Nice, Azazel, you've settled my mind. It's four walls and a floor, so it's considerable distance and interference (an old Motorola 3347-02 router gets almost zero signal down in that room), but I'll be adding to the range extender right off the bat.