Belkin AC 1200 DB Pro Reviews

The Belkin AC 1200 DB is well built, with a design that doesn't look out of place in the living room, and air vents for keeping it cool when it's working hard. Overall, it's a very good user-friendly AC modem router.

Belkin's AC 1200 DB wireless router is lighter on specs, features, and performance than the rest of the field. Its two-spatial-stream radios prevented it from finishing first in any tests, but it did surprise me by finishing second on two of my benchmarks (albeit while testing its 2.4GHz 802.11n performance). In fact it delivered better 2.4GHz 802.11n performance than several of the more sophisticated routers, thanks to its dogged insistence on maintaining channel bonding in that spectrum. The value of having two USB ports—one for sharing a printer, and the other for sharing a USB hard drive over the network—is severely diminished by the router's performance while hosting a storage device. With one exception, the AC 1200 DB was excruciatingly slow when reading and writing files over the network. This is clearly a checkbox item for Belkin, rather than an essential feature. Anyone with serious network storage needs would be well advised to buy a dedicated NAS box, but if you must rely on the less-expensive alternative of using router-hosted storage, you should avoid this particular router.