Wireless Reviews

Features

You can think of the DIR-895L/R as a 4x4 version of its 3x3 AC3200 class predecessor, the DIR-890L/R. The features of the two routers are the same as far as I can tell. So check the DIR-890L/R review for the details.

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Wireless features continue to be a bit on the thin side. You get three levels of transmit power adjust and wireless schedules. But there are no beamforming, airtime fairness or MU-MIMO enables and wireless bridging / repeating is not supported.

I moved the back panel switch from Router to Extender mode and tried to access the router to no avail. The User Manual has no mention of Extender mode, so I didn't waste much time trying to figure it out.

Since this is a tri-radio router, Broadcom's "Smart Connect" band steering comes with. But ASUS remains the only company to expose Smart Connect controls other than enable / disable; that's all you get in the DIR-895L/R.

Storage Performance

We used our standard router storage test procedure to measure file copy throughput for FAT32 and NTFS volumes connected via USB 2.0 and 3.0. I'll compare NTFS with USB 3.0 performance since that's what most people will want to use for maximum performance.

The DIR-895L/R's did pretty well on this test, topping the chart for write and coming in a close second for read.

USB 3.0 storage performance - USB 3.0

Routing Performance

The DIR-895L/R was tested with our V4 router test process, loaded with 1.11, Wed 22 Jun 2016 firmware. You can download an Excel test summary that contains all functional and performance test results.

Table 2 summarizes the performance test results along with Linksys' EA9500, NETGEAR's R8500 Nighthawk X6 and ASUS' RT-AC5300 that were retested using the new process.

The DIR-895L/R does comparatively well on the TCP/IP tests, with best unidirectional throughput in both directions. It also tops the group in the tougher simultaneous test with 1703 Mbps of total throughput.

The DIR-895L/R's simultaneous UDP performance is also better than the NETGEAR and ASUS, but can't compare to the Linksys. It's very unusual for UDP results to be as high as the EA9500's, but's that what it measured.

The DIR-895L/R passed the TCP connection test, but failed the UDP test, the common result. Most routers just don't hold UDP connections open for the three minutes it takes the test to run.

The Functional Score of 89.4% equates to 26 failed functional tests, a fairly high number. The HTTPS administration and triggered port forating tests failed because the router supports neither. A number of DNS tests related to the router's DHCP hostname handling and four UPnP tests also helped push up the failed test count. But a few other failures are worthy of note.

Three IPV4 forwarding tests showed the router failed to route corrupt and invalid packets properly. The problem more apt to give you agita is the router's failure to register a new gateway when the WAN IP DHCP lease is renewed and the gateway IP address changes (cdrouter_renumber_6 in the test summary). This can result in your internet connection going down.

Wireless Performance

The DIR-895L/R was tested with our new Revision 9 wireless test process with 1.11, Wed 22 Jun 2016 version firmware. Remember the new test process uses an AC1200 class Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 card, vs. an AC1900 class NETGEAR R7000 router configured as a wireless bridge. Channel 6 and 20 MHz B/W mode was set for 2.4 GHz and Channel 40 and 80 MHz B/W mode was set for 5 GHz. The router was positioned in the test chamber as shown in the photo below.

DIR-895L/R in test chamber

Average 2.4 GHz performance for all the AC5300 routers tested is in a relatively narrow range, except for the ASUS, which has at least a 10 Mbps advantage over the others for downlink. Uplink averages are all within 11 Mbps of each other.

2.4 GHz average throughput comparison

5 GHz average throughput is more varied, but the D-Link comes in at the bottom of both down and uplink comparisons.

5 GHz average throughput comparison