ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router Review

ASUS RT-N66U Power Consumption

Power consumption by your homes electronic devices continues to be a very important issue so we have made an attempt to present some simple power consumption tests on the various routers that we had. To measure idle usage, we reset each wireless router to the default settings and plugged them with no devices connected to them. We then measured the power draw from each router at the wall with our P3 International P4400 Kill-A-Watt electric usage monitor.

Benchmark Results: Power Consumption for the ASUS RT-N66U was towards the high end when compared to the various routers in our suite. It seems that a higher power use may be the cost of the great performance that we saw under testing.

Since most people will have their routers turned on for 24-hour a day operation, we think that examining power usage is an important benchmark. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is an important financial estimate that helps consumers direct and indirect costs of a product. In our TCO calculation we will be figuring up how much it costs to have a wireless router running per year in an idle state with the unit being installed 24-hours a day. We will be using 12.7 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) based on the bureau of labor statistics report from April 2012 showing that amount as the national average.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS RT-N66U was one of the fastest wireless routers that we tested, so we weren’t too surprised to see that the yearly cost of operation is a little on the high end. The question that most potential buyers will ask themselves centers on whether they think the ASUS RT-N66Us higher functioning performance makes up for the cost of operation.