NETGEAR WNDR4500 Pro Reviews

Incredibly fast, stylish and packed with features, making it perfect for offices and media enthusiasts that don’t want to invest in a full 802.11ac setup

The Netgear N900 certainly comes in an attractive package, with a sleek gloss black body that is supported vertically on a clear plastic stand, giving the impression it is suspended in mid-air. Along one edge there are LED indicators and along the other is an excellent set of connections, including two USB 2.0 ports, a 10/1000Mbps WAN port and four 10/1000Mbps LAN ports. Setup is very straightforward, thanks to Netgear's Genie, which uses a good combination of graphics and text to provide explanations and offer an excellent level of control and flexibility.

The Netgear WNDR4500 is the company’s top-of-the-line router (unless we count in the recently announced equipment with 802.11ac support). It looks good with its large and pretty case with in-built antennas, handy indication system, two USB ports, dedicated Wi-Fi On/Off and WPS buttons. Unfortunately, there is no flexibility in positioning this router. The hardware platform is advanced, delivering high performance in routing tests. The wireless modules are up to the mark, too. There are not so many routers with two 450 Mbps frequency bands available on the market, usually just a single model in each maker’s product range. Of course, they can only show their best with appropriate client adapters, but the speed is high even with 300Mbps clients. The new revision of the Netgear Genie firmware has become easier to use and more modern, but we don’t understand why it lacks some features that used to be available in the previous version. As for the USB interface, the WNDR4500 supports all-in-ones and scanning. The data-transfer speed is rather low with external disks while the access control system is too limited. Thus, the Netgear WNDR4500 is going to be interesting for people who need high routing speed and maximum 802.11n performance.

If you are looking for a fast, feature-rich dual-band router that is easily customizable, the Netgear WNDR 4500 is a router you should definitely take a close look at.

Other nifty features include a traffic meter that can be set up to provide warnings when your data quota is a little too close for comfort; the USB ports support printer sharing; there are parental filters that work with OpenDNS, just like the ones in the Netgear N600 that we reviewed at the start of the year, as well as keyword and domain name blocking, which brings up a nice, big warning any time someone tries to access content that's been flagged. The Netgear N900 is definitely a good router to go for if you're ultimate need is fast wireless speed. Short of an 802.11ac router, it's the next best option and it will provide reliable speeds that are faster than the norm from close range and from long distance. Importantly, it's also not very difficult to set up and its interface is intuitive.

Netgear's big beefy dual-band router delivers the fastest throughput we've seen on the 2.4 GHz band, which many of your consumer electronics devices probably use.

guess I'll have to suspend judgement on the WNDR4500 for its performance with two-stream clients until the issue I discovered is resolved. In the meantime, I can judge it on its three-stream performance, where it performs better in 5 GHz than in 2.4.Competitively, there are only two other routers I've tested that support three-stream N in both bands and in both 20 and 40 MHz mode: D-Link's DIR-665 (Marvell-based) and TRENDnet's TEW-692GR (Ralink based). In this small field, the WNDR4500 actually does pretty well. But as I've seen with virtually every other router, the WNDR4500 isn't a clear winner in all four benchmark suites. Despite the tuning and tweaking that NETGEAR has done, I didn't get the sense that the 4500's throughput vs. range performance is overwhelmingly better than the competition. But it's not overwhelmingly worse, either. NETGEAR has also thrown its own monkey wrench into your selection process by giving it a subset of the features of its less-expensive WNDR3800 sibling. If you're paying top-dollar for a wireless router, why shouldn't it have the best performance and feature set? If you don't need three-stream N, you can give the WNDR4500 a pass. If you're set on a high-end NETGEAR router, the WNDR3800 would be your choice for features and the WNDR4000 for performance.

The Netgear WNDR4500 N900 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router makes a very good investment for those who want to get the most out of a wireless network, especially when they have clients that support the 5GHz band.

There’s plenty to like about the Netgear WNDR4500. It’s compact and neatly designed, and the setup process is tremendously straightforward. Right now, Netgear’s Genie app is of more interest to novice users, but if the company can deliver on the upgrades it has told us about, it may prove its worth to the more technically-minded.