How much power does the Netgear WNDR3800 (N600) router consume

energyrouter

I am interested in the actual (i.e., measured) power consumption of a Netgear WNDR3800 router (also known as N600 wireless dual band gigabit router)

I couldn't find any reliable indication online, and deriving it from the adapter specs (12V DC @ 2.5A) in the manual is too imprecise.
I found a value for the slightly related WNDR4000 and WNDR3700 (7 – 7.9 Watt) but I am not sure the power values are similar. In this light, the one value I did find online for the WNDR3800 says about 5 Watt, which seems unrealistically low.

Edit: I can't measure the power consumption myself, as I don't own this type of router.

Edit2: I have this router now, so I measured the power consumption and wrote the results in an answer below.

Best Answer

Decided to buy one, and was able to do some measurements (European 230V situation), so might as well report the results here (which turned out even better than I expected):

No cables connected:

  • Power adapter only, with router turned off: 0.2 Watt
  • Out of the box, no WAN (modem) or LAN ethernet cables connected: 6.3 Watt

Internet (=cable modem) connected:

  • No ethernet connection, both radios OFF : 5.0 Watt (sometimes even 4.9 Watt)
  • No ethernet connection, 2.4GHz ON, 5GHz OFF: 5.7 Watt
  • One 1G ethernet connection, 2.4GHz ON, 5GHz OFF: 6.1 Watt
  • One 1G ethernet connection, 2.4GHz ON, 5GHz ON : 6.9 Watt

I didn't really test with substantial traffic. All of the above values were without any wired or wireless traffic (except perhaps for some light background traffic).

Bottom line:

Bottom line for my situation (one 1G computer connected, 5GHz radio OFF) is 6.1 Watt, going down to 5.7 Watt when my computer goes to sleep (i.e., ethernet connection goes down as well).

Related Question