Model: D-Link DIR-657
Supplier: D-Link
MSRP: $149.99     Find Lowest Price @ PriceGrabber
Author: Garret
Date: January 16, 2012

D-Link has always been a top competitor in the consumer router market, they offer great products that range from “average Joe” models to high end power user models, the DIR-657 is another introduction to D-Link’s high end router line.  The DIR-657 offers a lot of great features however lacks in a couple of extremely important categories that I think may turn users off to the device.

The design of the router itself is a solid black, very simplistic look that people will find very appealing near the rest of their tech gadgets.  They too have followed along with Cisco and completely removed all of the lights from the device with the exception of the essentials.  Also on the front of the device you’ll see the Wireless Protected Setup button and a place to insert an SD Card (more on that later.)  On the back you’ll see your standard array of ports, 4 gigabit ports on the LAN side, 1 gigabit WAN connection, and a USB 2.0 port for media sharing.

For wireless, the router supports 802.11b/g/n but is missing the 5ghz 802.11n radio.  Something I feel is inexcusable given the high price tag of the router.  If you’re like me, and live in an apartment complex, you’ll notice that everyone has their own wireless router making 2.4ghz wireless impossibly slow for anything besides basic internet access.  This makes having a 5ghz 802.11n network extremely useful, and helpful if you’re trying to push high bandwidth over the wireless (Netflix streaming, file transferring, etc…)  Another downfall of the router is its lack of support for 3^rd party firmware.  The processor used inside the DIR-657 cannot be supported by 3^rd party firmware limiting you to the web interface and functionality that D-Link supplies you, and unfortunately while it is fairly feature rich, it doesn’t come close to what a 3^rd party firmware like DD-WRT offers you.

The router’s firmware does offer a lot of Setup Wizards for most of its functionality, enabling non-tech savvy users the ability to configure their router accordingly.  The Media Sharing enables you to share pictures, music, and other content over your router via the supplied USB port and SD Card Slot.  The USB Port called “SharePort Plus” allows for sharing of USB Printers, NAS devices, and creating UPnP servers.  The web interface, I found to be fairly cluttered and difficult to navigate.  It also comes with IPv6 support out of the box, a much-welcomed feature as the transition to IPv6 slowly begins.  Another feature that D-Link markets a lot, is the router’s QoS service titled “HD Fuel.”  Essentially this is a WAN based Quality of Service (QoS) feature allowing you to prioritize traffic to ensure that things like video streaming, Skype Calls, and gaming aren’t interrupted by Torrents or other services.  I had the opportunity to test this quite extensively, and it works very well.  It offers a similar feature for wireless traffic prioritization called WISH (Wireless Intelligent Stream Handling.)  This allows you to specify wireless traffic priority based on service and IP address that’s connected to the network.  This also worked surprisingly well.  It also offers OpenDNS support which is a very cool feature for those who don’t want to use their ISPs DNS server.

Performance on the router is pretty consistent with others in the market.  Wired gigabit file transfers saw performance consistently in the 70-75MB/s range which is considerably fast, especially for those upgrading from a router that only supports 10/100 connectivity.  The wireless, when you can get into a clear area and use 40mhz worth of spectrum can see impressive file transfers around the 6-7MB/s range.  When you’re only using 20mhz, transfer speed is obviously considerably less.

Overall the router is a very nice product, it’s feature rich, and its HD Fuel QoS service is very nice to have, especially if you’re bandwidth constrained.  However, to me personally the lack of 3^rd party firmware support and no 5ghz radio is a deal breaker for me, especially given how expensive the router is and I have a hunch the power users will probably share the same opinion.

Pros

+ Gigabit LAN and WAN ports
+ HD Fuel
+Ascetically pleasing look.

 Cons

- No 5ghz Radio
- No 3^rd Party Firmware Support
- Features don’t justify price

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Tags: d-link, dir-657, Router, wireless