Wireless Reviews

Routing Performance

Routing throughput was measured using our standard router test process with the router loaded with 1.00.0. firmware. Table 5 summarizes the results and includes the ASUS RT-AC87U/R and NETGEAR R7500 for comparison.

The E8350's numbers are a bit lower than the NETGEAR and ASUS' in some cases, but close enough to make no real world difference. The Maximum Simultaneous Connection result was limited by our test process, so the higher numbers on the other products do not necessarily reflect better results.

The IxChariot unidirectional composite plot below shows periodic spikes up to peak speeds over 900 Mbps for both down and uplink.

Routing throughput unidirectional summary

The simultaneous up/downlink benchmark plot shows lower throughput in the first 10 seconds or so due to IxChariot's Nagle's algorithm implementation. Once that settles down it looks like uplink throughput is favored over downlink when both directions are running full blast. In all, like its AC2350 brethren, the E8350 provides as close to Gigabit routing speeds as you're going to get.

Routing throughput bidirectional summary

Wireless Performance

The E8350 is Wi-Fi Certified. It was tested using the Revision 8 Wireless test process with 1.00.0 firmware loaded.

The router comes with WPS enabled on both bands. A Win 7 client connect prompted to start a WPS PIN session. AWin 8 connection attempt did not show a WPS prompt at all. Instead, it made an unsecured connection and launched a browser, which redirected to the captive portal page previously discussed.

Both radios come up with unique SSIDs and auto channel and auto bandwidth modes. For throughput testing, the router was first reset to factory defaults, then set to channel 6 and 20 MHz only bandwidth mode for 2.4 GHz and channel 153 and 20, 40 or 80 MHz mode for 5 GHz set to enable 802.11ac link rates. The Linksys R7000 in bridge mode now used as our standard test client was connected using WPA2/AES encryption. This means that the profile data in the charts is for three stream operation.

Our standard practice with the new testbed is to center the router under test's antennas on the turntable, both front-to-back and side-to-side in the chamber. The chamber antennas are also centered on the turntable (front-to-back of chamber). This method is intended to keep maximum distance between the router under test and chamber antennas. The photo below shows the E8350 in the test chamber

E8350 in test chamber

The Benchmark Summary below shows the average of all wireless throughput measurements made over the tested attenuation range.

Linksys E8350 Benchmark Summary

To put these average values in perspective, compare each of the four average throughput benchmarks for all AC2350 routers tested with the latest V8 process. The E8350 ranks #2 for downlink in both bands and #1 for uplink.

Average Throughput comparison