Zyxel Prestige 336M review

Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Jan 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Zyxel's Prestige 336M is a MIMO wireless router, so you'll get better throughputs and distances when you use it with matching wireless adaptors.

It's also WiFi certified, so it's guaranteed to work with your existing WiFi kit, such as Centrino notebooks. It has four Ethernet ports for wired clients and a WAN Ethernet port that connects to an ADSL or Cable modem.

This is only the second router we've seen to use Windows Connect Now. Provided you have Windows XP Service Pack 2, you can first configure your wireless network on your PC and then transfer the settings via a USB key to other computers and your router. It certainly makes setting up the wireless network simple.

You still need to use the router's web-based management page to configure your broadband connection. Fortunately, there's a wizard that takes you through all the settings, so you'll soon be online. You might also want to change the wireless settings, too, as the defaults aren't very good. For example, the automatic wireless configuration picked a congested channel, so we manually changed it to use channel 11 instead.

The web-based management isn't much to look at, but we were impressed with how easy it made certain things. If you want to run your own server, you just pick the service you want to run from a drop-down menu and the PC on which it's running from another menu.

Performance was just below average when we used our Centrino notebook. Switching to Zyxel's Mimo PC Card adaptor (£54) got much better results, but not as quick as we've seen from other MIMO routers. It's not a bad router, but it's expensive, especially for a router without ADSL built in. If you want a fast cable router, D-Link's RangeBooster N 650 Router in our 'Also Consider...' is a better choice.

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