818DRU’s software interface is certainly attractive and very intuitive. Even though it’s heavily graphical we encountered no hiccups or lag throughout our experience. The home screen gives an overview of the network status, showing such information as active WiFi SSIDs and any connected devices. There are two tabs within the software – basic and advanced, basic is good enough for those wanting to simply use the router at its simplest form.


It’s great to see that 818DRU has the ability to use multiple SSIDs and offer both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency for the WiFi connectivity.


Inside the “Setup” area of the advanced tab there are a multitude of settings which can be adjusted to take full advantage of all that 818DRU offers.

Performance

Inside 818DRU we have Broadcom’s flagship BCM4708A chipset and combines 802.11n (600Mbps) with 802.11ac (1300Mbps) to supply a theoretical maximum of 1900Mbps.

In this section we’ll be testing out both the Ethernet (wired) performance and the wireless performance. Do accomplish this we use AIDA32’s network benchmark plugin (discontinued in the newer AIDA64). Below are the results:



The wired performance is as to be expected -- very good. Maintaining strong consistency throughout the 5 minutes of thorough testing.

The wireless performance provided some rather impressive results. Using 5GHz and wireless ac we managed to achieve 255MB/s over a 6m distance with a solid wall in its path.