Rajio
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ElizabethS
Last year Cisco released their Linksys E4200 maximum performance dual-band wireless-N router to rave reviews. It hit the market as one of the best wireless routers you could get in your home with impressive performance and great usability. This year Cisco is following up by launching their Linksys E4200v2 router. It looks pretty much the same as the original E4200 but its definitely worth a closer look at the changes.
For all intents and purposes, this router looks identical to the original E4200. Aside from a new power adapter, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. That’s not such a bad thing, since the design is pretty elegant as it is. It is just disappointing that they didn’t take the opportunity to add some hardware mounting brackets to the underside to add the option for wall mounting.
Once you get past the familiar outsides, you’ll find that the internals have been completely redesigned. It seems like most things on the inside have received an upgrade. The has double the RAM, eight times as much onboard memory, an upgraded CPU and switch, and higher performance radio components. 3x3 spaial streams are now supported on both 2.5 GHz and 5.0 GHz bands allowing speeds to top out at 450 Mbps. It even runs noticeably cooler than the previous model which had a tendency to get pretty warm over time.
Software wise, this unit runs a completely rewritten firmware but uses the same, familiar, Cisco Connect client that the rest of the Linksys routers employ. That means its just as user friendly as the other models in this lineup. Once again this router is superficially nothing new, just simply a more robust overall performance.
The upgraded performance is most noticeable when you’re reading and writing to the router’s USB storage, which is distinctly faster. If you’re handling large files, or need particularly strong performance you’ll love it. My tests with HD video streaming were okay with the original E4200 but with the E4200v2 it was impressively stronger. I was able to stream full HD video in real-time to multiple devices at a time, with no performance issues at all.
If you’re looking to set up a high performance network, the previous king of home routers has been dethroned. The E4200 was pretty nice, but the E4200v2 is clearly new router of choice. Its easy to set up and maintain. It looks good (admittedly identical to the previous E4200), and performs like a dream with fantastic signal strength, reliability, and speed. Its everything you could want in a high performance home wireless router.
