D-Link Taipan DSL-4320L
$499 | WWW.DLINK.COM.AU Disappointing for the dollars involved.
At just $100 less than the champion ASUS router, left, we expected the Taipan to bite into the ASUS’s performance, but sadly, no. The total bandwidth offered by this router is 3,200Mbps, with a single 2.4GHz 600Mbps and twin 5GHz 1,300Mbps networks, well below that offered by the ASUS.
Even just picking up this router gives an indication that there’s not much to it — it may look huge, but it’s extremely lightweight, suggesting the interior isn’t chock full of hardware. Six antennae power the 4x4 radio, but it only has four Ethernet ports. On the plus side, it does include an ADSL/ VDSL modem, unlike the ASUS, which requires an external modem.
For this price, we expected extremely deep levels of customisation, but the bare interface is hardly any different from budget D-Link models, with hardly any features to speak of. It’s also extremely buggy, taking several SSID changes and reboots before we could get the 2.4GHz network to connect. Even then, the performance was initially slow, but rebooting again tripled the results. This left the performance in the top tiers of the roundup, though it was still up to 30% slower than the ASUS in some tests. The QoS section requires the user to manually set each device to a priority level, which is simple enough but limits one PC to having the lion’s share of the bandwidth; too bad if you have multiple gaming machines running at once.
At $500, we expected more. Despite excellent performance figures, it lacks the features and deep customisation of similarly priced units.