Netgear Nighthawk X8 R8500 AC5300 Router Brings Link Aggregation Mainstream
by Ganesh T S on December 31, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Networking
- NetGear
- Broadcom
- 802.11ac
- router
The Promise of Gigabit Wi-Fi
The Nighthawk X8 R8500 is marketed as an AC5300-class router. This naturally leads consumers to wonder whether it is really possible to get gigabit Wi-Fi (considering that an AC5300 router should theoretically support up to 2165 Mbps on each of the 5 GHz bands). In order to test out this aspect, we configured another R8500 in bridge mode (this is necessary to test 4x4 Wi-Fi bridging at the maximum possible link rate because 1024-QAM works only with other Broadcom devices, and the R8500 is the only Broadcom device that also has 4x4 capabilities).
Irrespective of where we placed the bridging router relative to the main R8500, we found that the link rate never reached 2165 Mbps, but topped out at 1733 Mbps. Eventually, we settled down on keeping the bridging router around 10 ft away, but, across a drywall (in order to simulate realistic conditions). The wired PCs connected to ports 3,4 and 5 of the main router were shifted to ports 1,2 and 3 of the bridging R8500. To our consternation, the results from running our folder download / upload test were downright abysmal.
While we did see occasional bursts of more than 800 Mbps during the testing, the majority of the time was spent in the 100 Mbps range. Apparently, we were not the only people to notice this issue, leading me to believe that there is still plenty of scope for performance improvements in the R8500.
It must be noted that the bridged R8500 connects only to one of the 5 GHz SSIDs. Could the second SSID help in driving up the throughput numbers? The R8500 in bridge mode was obviously not performing well. So, we shifted to using two Netgear Nighthawk R7000 routers in bridge mode, with each one connecting to one of the 5 GHz SSIDs. Ideally, we should also have had a third router in bridge mode to connect to the 2.4 GHz band, but we decided to test out with bridging on just the two 5 GHz SSIDs. We also cut down the number of clients from three to two (one to each bridging router).
The performance in this case was much better. We managed to sustain close to gigabit speeds over wireless (over two 5 GHz channels) for the multi-client upload and download cases. Note that each stream managed between 400 Mbps and 500 Mbps only despite a link rate of 1300 Mbps.
Concluding Remarks
We set out to check the effectiveness of link aggregation with the Netgear R8500 and Netgear ReadyNAS RN214, and we are pleased with the user-friendliness of the whole process. Netgear has managed to bring the concept of link aggregation to mainstream consumers with the Nighthawk X8 R8500 AC5300 router. The ReadyNAS RN214 is a nice complement to the router for this purpose. The whole setup process is pretty much seamless. The sole suggestion we would like to make here is that the ReadyNAS web UI could make the transmit has policy for 802.3ad LACP to be Layer 2 + 3 by default (instead of Layer 2 only).
On the gigabit Wi-Fi side, consumers are going to be a tad disappointed. Despite claims of up to 5.3 Gbps speeds, the router seems barely capable of 1 Gbps over Wi-Fi (out of a possible theoretical 4.3 Gbps) under real world conditions. Though we didn't set out to review the full capabilities of the Nighthawk X8 R8500, it is evident from our limited wireless testing that there is plenty of scope for performance improvements in the firmware.
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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.