TP-LINK N600 Wireless Dual Band USB Adapter (TL-WDN3200) Review

Others/Networking Gear by stefan @ 2012-09-19

The TP-LINK N600 is an affordable dual band USB adapter, which offers decent performance, a quite good coverage and supports Wi-Fi Protected Setup. As a bundle the manufacturer also offers an USB extension cable and an easy to use software for the Windows operating system.

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Extra Info and Test Results

Wired Station

 

CPU: Intel I7 3770K Retail

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14

Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional

RAM: AVEXIR Core Series 4x8GB DDR1600

Video: AMD RADEON HD 7970 3GB

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11

Case: Thermaltake ARMOR+ LCS

 

On the installation CD, besides the drivers, we will also find a small customization application, that we can choose to install or not (it is not mandatory); the application comes with a pleasant and easy to use GUI and the menus can be accessed by pressing the buttons represented by icons on the top side. The Status menu shows us detailed information regarding the current network we have connected to:

 

 

If we are using WPS, we should go straight to the respective menu:

 

 

On the Network tab, we will find the currently detected networks nearby, along some details like operating channel, security type or signal levels:

 

 

When connecting to a network, we will be prompted for a password and if the connection is successful, a profile will be created in the respective menu:

 

 

Finally, the Advanced tab lets us choose the current network adapter, use SoftAP (which transforms the small adapter into an access point so other devices like mobile phones, tablets can connect too to the network) or use the Power Save mode:

 

 

For performing the tests, we have used a Media Center PC equipped with the AMD A6-3650 APU, the Radeon HD 7750 VGA card and 12GB of RAM.To test the USB Wireless LAN adapters throughput, we have connected the server ( I7 PC ) to the router with a UTP wire and the client ( Media Center ) had installed the Wireless LAN adapters.

 

The application we have used to test the speeds was Performance Test 7.0, fully compatible with Windows 7.

 

2.4GHz Summary Graph

 

5GHz Summary Graph

 

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