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Buffalo WZR-HP-G450H review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £82
inc VAT

Huge file transfer speeds at range help compensate for the inadequacies of the WZR-HP-G450H's interface

Specifications

802.11n, 4x 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet ports

http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Buffalo claims its WZR-HP-G450H’s high power output ‘provides better coverage and signal quality in houses and large apartments’. It certainly looks the part, with its three adjustable aerials which you can unscrew in order to fit even larger third-party models. It doesn’t have an ADSL modem installed, so to use it with ADSL broadband you’ll need to plug an existing ADSL Ethernet modem or router into its WAN port.

By default, the router comes with the open-source DD-WRT firmware installed. This provides an extremely slick interface which makes it easy to find options and quick to save settings, but we found the WZR-HP-G450H’s version to be rather unstable. It would sometimes refuse to accept our username and password at various points during setup, and when we changed the router’s SSID from the default neither of our test Centrino 2 laptops could find it. The router’s transfer speeds were also slow with the DD-WRT firmware installed, managing only 19.82Mbit/s in our 10m test, which is around half what we’d expect.

Buffalo WZR-HP-G450H ports

To try to fix these problems we installed the latest Buffalo firmware from the WZR-HP-G450H’s support pages. Compared to the slickness of the DD-WRT interface, Buffalo’s own is a bit of a mess. The interface is ugly and fairly confusing – the router’s options are split into rough categories such as Setup, Internet/LAN, Wireless Config and Security, and sub-options are accessed with a scattering of tiny buttons under the tabs.

All the options you’d expect, such as UpNP, port forwarding, Quality of Service and Dynamic DNS, are present and work as you’d expect, but it’s not exactly easy tracking them down. Basic options such as wireless security and channel are easy to find and simple to change, but we were disappointed with the Buffalo firmware’s USB hard disk support. You’re meant to be able to plug in a USB drive to share over the network as a NAS or media server, or to act as storage for the router’s built-in BitTorrent client. We had trouble with it, though – it only supports disks formatted as FAT or FAT32, not NTFS, and refused to recognise the two USB sticks we plugged in.

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Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Modem type none
802.11b support yes
802.11g support yes
Draft 802.11n support yes
Draft 802.11n 5GHz support no
MIMO yes
Turbo mode channel-bonding
Stated speed 450Mbit/s

Security

128-bit WEP no
WPA2 yes
Firewall yes
MAC address filtering yes
DMZ yes

Physical

Size 165x158x35mm
Antennas 3
Internal/external antennas external
Upgradeable antenna yes
Number of WAN ports 1
Ethernet ports 4
Ethernet connection speed 10/100/1000Mbit/s
Other ports USB
Wall mountable yes
Power consumption on 4W

Other Features

Dynamic DNS yes
Universal Plug and Play support yes
DHCP server yes
MAC spoofing yes
Port forwarding yes
WDS Support no
USB device support yes
QoS yes

Buying Information

Price £82
Warranty two years RTB
Supplier http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop
Details www.buffalo-technology.com