SmallNetBuilder

Internal details

Figure 4 is a shot of the 4500's main board taken from the FCC documents. Although the photos are fuzzy, the shields present on the production version are removed to reveal component details.

See the slideshow for more internal photos

The processor is the Ubicom IP5160—the same as used on the DIR-655. The gigabit switch however, is a Realtek RTL8356, instead of the Vitesse VSC7385 used on the DIR-655. The Realtek switch chip supports up to 9K jumbo frames, and I found that it handled 4K jumbo frames just fine. D-Link doesn't spec jumbo frame support, however, so that's just between you and me.

Figure 4: Main board

The mini-PCI radio module has been removed in Figure 4, but there is a shot of it in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Radio board

It uses the Atheros XSPAN dual band chipset, which includes a AR5416 Baseband / MAC and AR5133 3Tx, 3Rx 2.4/5 GHz radio.