Full Review

This router has been topping our charts for a while now, and it’s no surprise to see it sitting pretty at the head of our top five list. The WNR834B is a sleek piece of equipment, with no jutting antennae. This does not hamper performance by much, though; the router was the fastest through short and medium ranges, and it was only when we pushed the range above thirty feet that it suffered in any way. The excellent mixed-mode (draft-N and G together) performance is good news for all those who haven’t yet bought their next batch of laptops. Draft-N is standard on all new laptops, but there are many thousands of 802.11 G machines out there yet. The router is extremely easy to set up. It automatically detects other network devices, and reconfigures itself to not cause a conflict. This unique feature is extremely useful, since many people will be plugging this into a home network that also has a DSL modem on the same default IP address. With other routers, you have to know about this problem, and manually reconfigure, but Netgear takes care of all that for you. The web-based setup interface is very easy to use, and it even checks automatically for firmware updates and informs you. All these features combined with a good price propelled the Netgear Rangemax WNR834B to the top of our charts.

Bottom Line

The WNR834B is a sleek piece of equipment, and comes with a host of great features at an affordable price.