Tenda A301 Wireless N300 Universal Range Extender Review

Testing & Methodology

It took me a little while to come up with a testing scenario for the WiFi range extenders as I wanted to provide relevant information on both how to do it right and wrong. But I think I’ve come up with a good solution and I hope you all agree.

At first I’ll place my router as far from the test system as possible and run a couple baseline tests to have something to compare the results to. I’ve limited the router to the max possible IEEE 802.11 standard which, in this case, is N with 300Mbps. Now, my router can do N600 which is faster, but we should still see the difference with these scenarios.

Once the baseline tests are in, I’ll move the range extender around to three different locations. The first being close to the router, the next about midway between the router and the system that connects through WiFi, and lastly I’ll move the WiFi extender closer to the receiving system and further away from the router.

Some of these scenarios will give me a better performance, some will give me a worse performance. Which is best will be seen on the following pages.

Hardware

• Supermicro C7Z97-OCE
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Sapphire R7 240 2GB
• BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer
• Asus PCE-AC68 Dual-Band wireless adaptor

We would like to thank our sponsors for supplying us with the equipment needed to perform these tests.

Software

• PassMark PerformanceTest Suite
• Windows 7 Ultimate