I first checked to make sure that both the G V5 and GL that I purchased from an online retailer had the latest firmware. The GL was fine with its 4.30.2 firmware, but I had to update the V5's firmware from 1.00.6 to 1.00.9.

Since I don't have access to the wide variety of broadband connections out there in the big, wide world, I had to limit my testing to what I could do on a private LAN. So I fired up my trusty copy of IxChariot and started out with simple upload and download throughput tests. The two test computers were a Dell Inspiron Notebook with 1GHz Celeron, 576 MB RAM and WinXP Home SP2 and a Fujitsu S2020 Notebook with AMD Athlon XP-M 2100+, 496 MB RAM and WinXP Home SP2. I used the IxChariot throughput.scr script with TCP/IP protocol and modified the 100,000 Byte file size parameter to 1,000,000 Bytes.

Figure 4: Linksys WRT54G V5 Upload Throughput

Figures 4 and 5 show upload and download throughput, which at 48 and 54 Mbps respectively are each over twice what the original V1 could do. Note that the "Abandoned" Run Status in Figure 5 isn't any fault of the V5, but just means that I had to manually stop the test. The IxChariot console can't retrieve test results from its endpoints through some SPI+NAT firewalls, and the V5 is one of them. I normally can get past this by putting the LAN machine in DMZ and disabling SPI. But neither the V4 or GL provide any SPI enable/disable controls.

Figure 5: Linksys WRT54G V5 Download Throughput

I've recently started to run simultaneous up and download throughput tests because the latest-generation routers have routing speeds that can outrun the 100 Mbps LAN ports that most of them have. Figure 6 shows the results of such a test on the V5. The glitches from time to time are probably due to IxChariot, since I ran into them when testing the RangeMax 240 wireless router awhile ago. Also note a slight drop in the total up/down throughput from the 54 Mbps download throughput, which is typical of what I see when running multiple test streams.

Figure 6: Linksys WRT54G V5 Simultaneous Up and Down Throughput