Wireless Reviews

OpenVPN Performance

NETGEAR has been supporting OpenVPN on its newer routers for over a year now. We even wrote a how-to for it.

Quick throughput tests using drag-and-drop of a 1.15 GB Windows backup (.bkf) file with everything connected via Gigabit Ethernet typically showed 3.5 MB/s moving the file from the R8500 to a Windows 8 OpenVPN client...

OpenVPN Server router-to-client throughput

...and about the same in the client-to-router direction.

OpenVPN Server client-to-router throughput

This isn't that impressive. The Marvell-based Linksys WRT1900ACS produced 10 - 12 MB/s using the same test method.

Storage Performance

The R8500 is the only AC5300 class router we've tested. So the summary below shows it plus all AC3200 routers we've tested with our standard procedure with USB 3.0 connection and NTFS format—the combination that should produce the highest throughput. You can get all the other benchmarks in the Router Charts. Since all AC3200 routers are based on the same Broadcom architecture, this comparison provides a good look at storage performance using the new BCM47094 vs. the BCM4709 used in all the AC3200 routers.

Storage Performance Comparison - USB 3.0

I've found storage performance varies widely among products using the same processor; a lot depends on the drivers used and how much CPU and memory is allocated to storage. The ASUS RT-AC3200 is almost 25% faster on NTFS write. But the R8500 beats it by 8% on read.

Routing Performance

Routing throughput was measured using our standard router test process with the router loaded with V1.0.0.56_1.0.28 firmware. Table 2 summarizes the results and includes two other AC3200 class routers for comparison. Performance is more alike than different.

The IxChariot unidirectional composite plot for shows typical cyclical variation between average throughput and peaks between 940 and 950 Mbps for both directions. The higher uplink throughput is consistent from product to product and likely a test method artifact.

Routing throughput unidirectional summary

The simultaneous up/downlink benchmark plot doesn't show the typical battling between up and downlink we frequently see.

Routing throughput bidirectional summary