Performance and Power Consumption
To put the Asus RT-AC87U through its paces, the wireless performance was tested by sending bi-directional data streams to a Gigabit-connected desktop from a high-performance laptop making use of the Asus EA-AC87 in Media Bridge mode. The laptop was connected to the EA-AC87 through a wired gigabit connection. This testing was done on the 5GHz bands at two different distances.
- Short range - approximately five metres with no line-of-sight disruptions
- Medium range - approximately 15 metres with multiple room separation
It's worth remembering that the results are specific to our test environment: your mileage may vary depending on receiving hardware and local conditions. In our testing we pitched the Asus RT-AC87U (£185) against the Asus DSL-AC68U (£180) which is identical to the RT-AC68U (£145) except with a baked-in DSL modem.
Asus pledged a significant performance upgrade with the RT-AC87U and we certainly witnessed that in our testing. Download throughput rose from around 400 mbps on the AC68U to as high as 730 mbps on the AC87U. At longer distances those speeds fell back to around 400 mbps on the RT-AC87U but those numbers are still high enough to get an almost-wired network experience and represent an almost twofold increase over the AC68U.
Write speeds were less impressive but there's been a notable generational improvement with the RT-AC87U compared to the AC68U. Impressively, the AC87U at medium range is substantially faster than the AC68U at short range when uploading data to another location.
Power consumption was hardly affected by the additional performance. Our inclination is that the baked-in DSL modem on the Asus DSL-AC68U causes a few extra watts of power consumption so the RT-AC87U is only a fraction more power hungry than its predecessor. The complete package manages to stay below 20-watts even when placed under significant USB and network loading.
In USB testing the Asus RT-AC87U made a 10 per cent improvement over its predecessor in both read and write speeds. The numbers are still notably behind the theoretical potential of USB 3.0 but its nice to see some generational improvement. The slight speed increase can probably be attributed to slightly faster internal hardware and firmware optimisations.