ASUS PL-AC56 1200Mbps AV2 1200 Wi-Fi Powerline Adapter Kit Review

Test System, Software, & Methodology

Testing a network over power circuitry kit like this is relatively simple. Plug them in at various distances, connect a test bench to each, and measure the throughput. And that is what I’m going to do. Both my test systems are equipped with 10GASE-T network cards which make sure that host speeds aren’t an issue and a bottleneck.

When testing this kind of setups, we need to keep in mind that the advertised bandwidth is under optimal conditions. The age and quality of the cables that run inside your walls, the route they take will have an effect on the possible performance. Other connected devices can also create interference that will limit the devices. A general rule of thumb is that the newer your apartment or house is, the better your performance will be. My apartment is from the 1970s, so it will have quite an impact here.

I’ll be using Passmark PerformanceTest 8’s advanced network test for this. It allows to define the connection type, packet sizes, and test length and as such, it provides a great amount of information.

I will run tests with both TCP and UDP connections and both times I’ll run tests with fixed packets of 16384 Bytes and variable packet sizes from 32 Bytes to 16384 Bytes. Each of these tests will run for 5 minutes.

Hardware System One

• Supermicro C7Z97-OCE
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz DDR3
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Sapphire R7 240 2GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer
• Lian Li PC-T60

Hardware System Two

• Gigabyte Z79X UD5H-BK
• Intel Core i7-4790K
• G.Skill Ares DDR3 1866MHz (2x4GB)
• OCZ Vertex4 256GB
• CoolerMaster Silent Pro Hybrid 850W
• NZXT Kraken X60
• Dimastech Easy V3

Software

• Passmark PerformanceTest 8: Advanced Network Test