D-Link DIR-X1860
The DIR-X1860 occupies an unconvincing middle ground between two better options
SCORE
PRICE £74 (£89 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318dlink
D-Link submitted only a single router for this month’s Labs, but the DIR-X1860 makes a definite impression: at £89, it’s very nearly the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 router here, undercut only by Honor’s absurdly affordable Router 3.
It’s also one of the dinkiest models on test, with a footprint measuring just 224 x 142mm without its four antennae. Though small, the physical design is perfectly practical: the four LEDs at the front are more informative than the Honor’s single multipurpose light, and at the rear you get four Ethernet sockets and a discreet WPS button. USB doesn’t make the cut, but that’s no surprise at this price.
The DIR-X1860 also has a few tricks that the Honor Router 3 lacks. The web interface includes a neat visual QoS tool that lets you drag devices into different priority levels, a configurable firewall with a schedule and an inbound VPN server with dynamic DNS. Meanwhile, those who like the sound of their own voice can use either Alexa or the Google Assistant to control the guest network, check network settings or reboot the router.
As for the wireless hardware, D-Link has here taken an interestingly opposite approach to Honor. The
5GHz radio has a quoted top speed of only 1,200Mbits/sec, which is half what the Router 3 is supposedly capable of. At the same time, the DIR-X1860 supports 4x4 MU-MIMO while the Honor is stuck at 2x2, meaning it’s not immediately obvious which should be faster overall.
Our download test settled the question: shock horror, the more expensive router was faster. In almost every part of the house, using both old and new wireless standards, the DIR-X1860 convincingly outpaced the Router 3, falling behind only in the Wi-Fi 6 bathroom test.
That result needs to be kept in perspective, however. As our graphs on p92 illustrate, the DIR-X1860’s performance still situates it very much towards the lower end of the market, and with prices as they are, this makes the D-Link a problematic proposition. If you’re not bothered about performance, it’s hard to argue that you shouldn’t go for the cheaper Honor Router 3 instead – while if you are, it’s probably worth paying the extra £62 for Asus’ far faster RT-AX82U ( see p80).