Digital Trends

D-Link DI-624 XtremeG

May 28th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Wired and Wireless Performance

We tested the DI-624 along with the Dell Truemobile 2300 and the Compex NetPassage 26G 802.11g routers. We fitted our test computers with various wireless access devices also, such as D-Link's DWL-G520 AirPlus XtremeG PCI adapter, D-Link's DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG cardbus adapter, Compex' iWavePort WL54G PCMCIA card adapter, Sonnet's Aria Extreme 54g PCMCIA adapter, and the internal Broadcom 54g wireless card found in the Compaq Presario R3060 notebook. We also tested on both Windows XP and Mac OS X operating systems. Our tests were conducted in real-world environments; a small office and two different two-story houses in suburban developments. In testing, we used highly compressed files — such as the 508MB demo for the game Far Cry and the 137MB Windows XP Service Pack 1 — so that hardware compression couldn't have an effect on our tests.

Wired performance was excellent. With our highly compressed test files, we averaged about 55.8Mbps on 15 different transfers and topped out several times at over 75Mbps, with the highest being 75.4Mbps. This was consistent with all of our test machines.

Our wireless test results varied greatly however, as is often the case with wireless devices, and we ran across several issues.

The DWL-G520 PCI slot wireless card worked well with the DI-624 — for the most part. With two different VIA chipset-based motherboards we experienced extreme lockups of our systems. These lockups only occurred when certain applications were running. For instance, with the game Call of Duty, we experienced no problems and were able to play the game online. But with Medal of Honor — Spearhead, we couldn't even get past the intro movie. The first scene was so choppy that each time we tried to play, the game would crash before the cut scene was over. Once we disabled the wireless Internet, we had no problems. Of course with this “solution” we couldn't play online.

We experienced this issue again intermittently when we tried to run two different programs at once on another VIA-based system. One such combination was a small timer program to time a download running at the same time as a file transfer. With this combination of processes running, the computer would lock up.

Unfortunately, D-Link's customer service could not help us online or on the phone and the issue was never resolved. The problem only occurred with a handful of programs and other motherboards and chipsets were fine. The problem seemed to be only with AMD Athlon XP based motherboards with a VIA chipset.