Wireless Reviews

Features

The AD7200's admin GUI and feature set is basically the same as the Archer C2600 and C3200. Refer to this summary and use the online emulator to further explore features.

Basic mode status

The screenshot below shows the Advanced > System Tools > System Parameters > Wireless Advanced screen for the 2.4 and 5 GHz radios. Note there is no USB 3.0 Interference Reduction checkbox in the 2.4 GHz settings. The Multi-User MIMO checkbox shouldn't be shown in the 2.4 GHz screen. TP-LINK confirms it's a bug and will have no effect on router performance.

Both radios have AP Isolation options, but neither has the Airtime Fairness controls found in the Broadcom-based Archer C3150. On the plus side, WDS-based wireless bridging is supported on both 2.4 and 5 GHz, where it isn't in the C3150.

Wireless Advanced settings

For those curious about the 60 GHz radio settings, the two screens related to them are merged into one below. Channel choices are Auto (default), 1, 2 and 3.

60 GHz radio settings

Storage Performance

The summary graphic below from the Router Charts shows the AD7200 and AC2600 and AC3100 / 3150 class routers we've tested with our standard procedure with USB 3.0 connections and NTFS drive format. The AD7200 doesn't do well, coming in at the bottom of both comparisons.

Storage Performance Comparison - USB 3.0 / NTFS

Routing Performance

The Talon AD7200 was loaded with 1.0.9 Build 20160602 rel.37987 firmware and tested with our V4 router test process. You can download an Excel test summary that contains all functional and performance test results.

Table 2 summarizes the performance test results.

Total Simultaneous TCP/IP and UDP throughput are proving to be better performance differentiators than the unidirectional benchmarks. The highest performer so far for both benchmarks has been D-Link's DIR-879 AC1900 EXO router at 1850 Mbps and 1900 Mbps for TCP/IP and UDP, respectively. Results for other 4x4 routers are shown in the bar charts below for comparison.

Total Simultaneous throughput comparison

Most products fail the new maximum UDP connection test and pass the TCP connection test and that's what the AD7200 did.

The Functional Score of 93.5% is quite good, second only to the 95.1% for Linksys' EA9500 and represents only 16 tests failing out of the 245 in the CDRouter test suite.

The largest group of failed tests were related to how the router's DNS proxy handles local DHCP server hostnames. Two fails are due to the router not supporting HTTPs admin connections.

On a positive note, the triggered port forwarding tests that fail for most other routers passed for the AD7200. The reason is the router supports mixing of single and port ranges in both the triggering and forwarded port settings.