D-Link Performace Series DIR-890L AC3200 Router Review

Bohs Hansen / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing
At the time of writing, the D-Link DIR-890L AC3200 Ultra Tri-Band Wi-Fi router with six high-performance beamforming antennas can be yours through Amazon for $238.00 in NA and £184.97 in the UK.

Conclusion

Let us start with the price point as that’s the last mentioned item before this section. While the D-Link DIR890L certainly isn’t the cheapest router on the market, it is an amazing one priced more than fair for its capabilities.

It’s probably not the router that’s most useful to a single person living in a small apartment, but that’s because it wasn’t built for this. The DIR-890L is built for large homes with a lot of devices that all require an internet connection at the same time. The extra 5 GHz band allows you to connect a lot more devices without congesting the available bandwidth. That’s improved even further thanks to the SmartConnect feature which allows the router to assign the best possible connection to each connected device without bottlenecking the rest.

The router showed a great throughput in my testing environment, achieving up to half of the advertised bandwidth with over 600Mbps. While that doesn’t sound like a good result, I can assure you that it’s great for this location and easily 25% or more above a lot of other routers that I’ve tested. That’s no doubt due to the six external antennas and the SmartBeam technology that directs the signal strength in the direction of the connected device.

The user interface is intuitive and easy to use, even for novice users. If the more advanced users aren’t happy with that, then there’s no need to go other places either as the DIR-890L also supports DD-WRT where you’ll get access to pretty much any feature that the hardware can offer – without the D-Link specific ones of course. Which of the two GUIs you want is up to you since it allows for both.

The D-Link DIR-890L is also a very beautiful router. The stylish and reflecting red surface makes it stand out and the six antennas located all around the device give it that final touch. Of course, taste is personal and subjective, but I really like it and think it looks awesome.

So in short, if you got a large or difficult WiFi home with dead spots and need to connect a lot of wireless devices of various generations, then the D-Link DIR-890L AC3200 Ultra WiFi router will be a great and affordable choice.

Pros

Looks stunning
Great performance
Great coverage
Fair pricing
Easy to use GUI and also DD-WRT compatible
Tri-Band for less WiFi congestion

Cons

None

“The DIR-890L is a perfect choice for large homes as it helps to eliminate dead spots, it lessens WiFi congestions, and generally performs great.”