Netgear Nighthawk R7000 AC1900 Review

Leo Waldock October 27, 2014 Routers

We supplement our findings on the previous page with some tests using one of the newest Mac Pro 2013 models. This supports 802.11ac wireless as well as 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands.

Mac Pro 2013 System:

CPU: Intel Xeon e5 2697 V2
SSD: 1TB Apple PCIe
Graphics: AMD Firepro D500 (x2)
Memory: 64GB 1866mhz DDR3 ECC.
Operating System: OSX 10.9.5

For our short range test, the system will be positioned around 3 meters away from the router in the same room. This represents a typical usage scenario where the R7000 is required to provide a wireless signal for multiple devices in the same room.

For medium range testing, our system was positioned around 6 meters from the router on the building’s floor below. This way the signal will have to travel through the floor and a couple of plasterboard walls. These tests are being run in a typical four bedroomed house, so its a fairly common usage scenario for our readers.

We’ll also be running a long-range test with the system positioned around 10 meters from the router horizontally on the building’s floor below. The signal will have to travel through several walls and the floor, making this procedure the most demanding. This represents a typical usage scenario in which the router is required to provide a wireless signal to multiple devices located in separate rooms of the house.

Performance between the Netgear NightHawk R7000 and LinkSys WRT1900AC is very close indeed. It was interesting to note that with this particular configuration, the R7000 led slightly at both short range and long range, but lost out a little in the medium range test.