The IT Nerd

Advance warning: This review is going to make some Canadians very jealous for reasons that I will explain shortly.

Last year I reviewed the Linksys WRT1900AC and I had this to say at the time:

If you want the best performance from your router, you need to get the WRT1900AC from Linksys. It’s the quickest router that I have seen lately. 

Fast forward one year and I have in my hands the successor to the WRT1900AC. Dubbed the Linksys WRT1900ACS, it doesn’t look any different than the WRT1900AC:

It doesn’t look any different from the front.

Ditto from the back as you still get four Gigabit Ethernet ports, an eSATA/USB 2 port, and a USB 3 port. The real news is what’s inside. Specifically:

• A faster dual core CPU running at 1.6GHz versus 1.2GHz in the WRT1900AC
• 512MB of DDR3 memory compared to 256MB in the WRT1900AC
• There’s no fan in the WRT1900ACS. But I don’t think it matters as I never heard the fan spin up in the WRT1900AC.

One other change, the power supply is no longer a inline power supply. You now get a large outlet hogging brick that blocks any other outlet that’s near it in something like a UPS or a power bar. Plus the cable is shorter too. That is a bit of a #fail and that will be the only criticism that I will have for Linksys as the rest of this review will be positive.

What hasn’t changed is all the things that made the WRT1900AC really great. Specifically the ease of setup via Linksys Smart WiFi, and the features that I detailed in the WRT1900AC review. Including the ability to use open source firmware such as the popular Open WRT firmware, and the ability to plug in a hard drive to serve up some network storage to everyone on your network. Plus it comes with OpenVPN support, though those with the WRT1900AC could get that via a firmware update. But the real question that all you care about is if it’s faster than the WRT1900AC. The answer is yes. To illustrate this, I did some simple tests with both routers. I set my MacBook Pro 15 feet away from the routers and copied a 10MB file over 802.11ac to and from my network attached storage to get a measure of the throughput of the two routers. Here’s the results:

WRT1900ACS: 536Mbps

WRT1900AC: 523Mbps

In real terms, if you’re shuffling large files around your network, you will notice the difference between the two routers. But its not Earth shattering. But for what it’s worth, surfing the net and doing backups to my NAS box via 802.11ac is noticeably faster than before via the WRT1900ACS. My wife made the same comment, so I know I’m not seeing things.

But what was Earth shattering was the same test done over Ethernet:

WRT1900ACS: 885Mbps

WRT1900AC: 787Mbps

That was more of a difference in favor of the WRT1900ACS. In either case, the new internals do make a difference.

Now this router isn’t cheap. The Linksys WRT1900ACS goes for $229 US and it’s available now in the US. Canadians will have to wait until early 2016 to get their hands on one. That means that I am one of the few people in Canada to have this level of performance. At least for the time being. But here’s the bottom line. If you’re upgrading from another router to get 802.11ac, the WRT1900ACS is the one to get. It’s fast and it is feature rich. What more could you ask for?

This entry was posted on December 1, 2015 at 10:00 am and is filed under Products with tags Linksys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.