Wireless Reviews

Features

The TEW-827DRU's admin GUI and feature set is similar to the A1900 class TEW-818DRU. Below is a screenshot taken from TEW-827DRU's emulator.

TRENDnet TEW-827DRU Landing page

A key difference between the Broadcom-based TEW-818DRU and QCA-based TEW-827DRU is QoS. The 827DRU includes Qualcomm's StreamBoost automatic Traffic Shaping. Qualcomm's StreamBoost doesn't let you set rules for specific services. You can only specify relative device priority; StreamBoost automatically analyzes traffic types and prioritizes real-time traffic (streaming, gaming) higher than things like file tranfers and web browsing

TRENDnet TEW-827DRU StreamBoost

On the TEW-818DRU, you'll find QoS under the Advanced Setup settings. Broadcom's QoS is priority based with five levels, with separate controls for both up and download internet traffic. You can manually create QoS rules based on IP address, protocol and port.

TRENDnet TEW-818DRU QoS

Table 2 summarizes some of the differences I discovered in going through the UI on the two routers. I also noticed some minor menu rearrangements. If you want to drill down and find some more differences, there's also an emulator for the TEW-818DRU.

Storage Performance

The summary graphic below from the Router Charts shows all 4x4 routers—both AC2350 / 2400 and AC2600—we've tested with our standard procedure with USB 3.0 connections and NTFS drive format.The Linksys EA8500 remains the storage performance champ among all 4x4 routers we've tested for NTFS read, but cedes that title to the NETGEAR R7500V2 for NTFS write.

The TEW-827DRU turned the poorest performance of any of the routers in this group, with a measly 6 MB/s write and only 36 MB/s read.

We were not able to get FAT32 tests to run. FAT32 writes failed after six files were transferred, with throughput dropping to zero after that. We tried multiple times, rebooting both the router and testbed computer between subsequent attempts. We also retried the test using a WD My Passport Ultra USB 3.0 drive, without success.

Storage Performance Comparison - USB 3.0 / NTFS

Routing Performance

Routing throughput was measured using our standard router test process with the router loaded with 1.00b011 (1.00 17 Nov 2015) firmware. Table 3 summarizes the results and includes the TP-LINK Archer C2600, Linksys EA8500 and Amped Wireless RTA2600 for comparison.

Although the numbers are slightly different, you'd find all four pretty much the same in real-world use. Even the Amped's lower maximum simultaneous connections value wouldn't be noticed.

The IxChariot unidirectional composite plot for the C2600 shows the cyclical throughput variation experienced when testing routers capable of maxing out a Gigabit Ethernet connection.

TRENDnet TEW-827DRU routing throughput unidirectional summary

The simultaneous up/downlink benchmark plot shows the usual jump near the start due to IxChariot's Nagle's algorithm implementation. Once that settles down, the throughput is stable for awhile, then downlink drops after the 50 second mark. Uplink is generally higher than downlink.

TRENDnet TEW-827DRU routing throughput bidirectional summary