Routers have often been an afterthought of a gaming setup. But nowadays people pay more attention to this crucial piece of network hardware. After all, all your game traffic goes through this box, so it’s important that it meets the standards. With the latest features like Wi-Fi 6 (and now 6E), Beamforming, and the latest in network security, the prices of premium routers have risen significantly north over the past few years, relative to the price of a regular laptop. many of the cases.
But flying in the face of fancy new features and premium price points is the TP-Link Archer A7. As Amazon’s best-selling router, with a 4.5-star rating out of more than 38,000 reviews, it clearly makes a lot of customers happy. So we wanted to test it in our gaming tests to see how it performs, and use it as our foundation for testing gaming routers in the future.
In a world of luxury muscle cars, the Archer A7 appears as a Toyota Corolla, with the essentials, plus a little extra. We go hands-on to see what a budget router that costs around $50 can do. Is cutting the router budget that far a good way to increase your gaming dollar, or should you spend more on a more expensive alternative?
Design
The Archer A7 has a reasonable pedestrian design, consisting of a horizontally oriented box with three spindly, external antennas. Typical of mainstream electronics, it has a glossy black plastic exterior, with two grooves that add some visual interest along the top of the router’s body. A series of green LEDs provides status information about power, internet, connections to the Ethernet ports, and whether the wireless signal is active. Finally, the company logo features prominently at the top, with an AC1750 badge on the right, both tastefully done in light grey.
The back of the Archer A7 continues the simple, yet functional theme. This includes between the antenna connections a physical power button, a USB port, a WAN port and four Ethernet ports, and finally a WPS switch. While nothing really stands out here, all the essentials are covered.
All in all, the router is somewhat compact, although it takes up more space than a router with a vertical design. The dimensions are 9.57 x 6.32 x 1.28 inches (243 x 160.6 x 32.5 mm).
Specifications:
| Processor | Qualcomm QCA9563 750MHz |
| Memory | 16MB Flash 128MB RAM |
| Ports | 1× Gigabit WAN port, 4× Gigabit LAN ports, 1× USB 2.0 port |
| encryption | WPA WPA2 WPA/WPA2-Enterprise (802.1x) |
| Wi-Fi technology | IEEE 802.11ac/n/a 5GHz IEEE 802.11n/b/g 2.4GHz |
| Dimensions | 9.6 × 6.4 × 1.3 in |
| Weight | 0.93 lbs |
| Price | $56.99 |
The Archer A7 is a dual-band router, which can simultaneously transmit 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz signals. It complies with the AC1750 standard by providing 2.4GHz speeds up to 450Mbps and 5GHz speeds up to 1300Mbps. If that seems a little slower than some of the others, it’s not your imagination. This router uses the now previous generation of Wi-Fi, 802.11ac, while most of the advanced modern networking equipment uses 802.11ax, with the latest network equipment announcements being Wi-Fi 6E. So this Archer A7 is a few rows away from the very latest, although it also costs a fraction of the price of most AX gaming routers.
There are five wired Ethernet ports, all of which have Gigabit speeds: one WAN and the other four LAN. There is also a single USB 2.0 port for use as an FTP or media server. Again, more expensive routers often have USB 3.0 ports, but a USB 2.0 port is sufficient for most file transfers given the router’s limited speed.
The specifications of the hardware are also quite basic. This includes a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9563 with an integrated 750MHz processor. The storage also comes with 128MB of RAM and 16MB of flash storage at the base level.
Installation and Features
Setup was done through the router’s website (you can also use the company’s Tether app), which went smoothly in a matter of minutes. The Archer A7 can be used as a router, access point or with other TP-Link OneMesh products for a whole-home mesh setup.
While it covers all the basics, the Archer A7’s overall feature set is fairly pedestrian. This includes the limitation that the latest wireless encryption standard, WPA3, is not supported. There is also no support for beamforming. However, the Archer A7 does have QoS, although it does not have detailed settings to prioritize different types of traffic. There is also support for running a VPN server.
Security
The Archer A7 falls short in terms of security, with no anti-malware feature to keep your network virus-free. However, it has the essentials a router needs, with a firewall and DoS protection that can be adjusted on three levels.
For families with children, the Archer A7 has some basic parental controls, with options for time limits and to restrict devices.
Performance
We put the Archer A7 through our bandwidth test using NetPerf software to quantify throughput. On the 2.4GHz frequency, throughput in our close test was 92Mbps, dropping to 51Mbps when we were about 3m away, which is slower than some of the more expensive routers we tested. The 5GHz test had better short-range performance at 535Mbps, although it also dropped significantly on the longer range to a fairly unremarkable 122Mbps. If you need better performance at long distances from the router, it’s a good idea to switch to a Wi-Fi 6 router.
| 2.4GHz close up | 2.4GHz version | 5GHz close by | 5 GHz version | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth (Mbps) | 92 | 51 | 535 | 122 |
Next, we ran the Archer A7 through our network congestion test suite. Our baseline wired test as indicated in Ethernet shows a solid FPS score of 112.3, with no Pingplotter spikes and a decent latency of 71 milliseconds in our overwatch game. Adding in the network congestion with the ten 8K videos, we see the FPS drop to 95.2 still playable, but at a high 43.8% lower frame rate with the router’s QoS turned off. Enabling QoS increased the FPS to 102.4 while reducing the number of lost frames on the streamed videos to 32.4%, demonstrating the value of the Archer A7’s QoS.
| Test configuration | QoS | FRAPS average | Max FPS | 8k lost frames | Pingplotter spikes | Latency ms (Overwatch) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethernet | new ones | 112.3 | 137 | N/A | 0 | 71 |
| Ethernet + 10 8k videos | new ones | 95.2 | 134 | 43.80% | 2 | 83 |
| Ethernet + 10 8k videos | Yes | 102.4 | 103 | 32.40% | 0 | 115 |
| 5GHz | new ones | 115.5 | 139 | N/A | 0 | 232 |
| 5GHz + 10 8k videos | new ones | 45.1 | 103 | 39.20% | 1 | 310 |
| 5GHz + 10 8k videos | Yes | 96.2 | 115 | 31.60% | 0 | 295 |
| 2.4GHz + 10 8k videos | Yes | 87.5 | 112 | 36.80% | 8 | 284 |
Connecting to the Archer A7 over 2.4GHz with QoS enabled yielded unimpressive results, with the FPS at 87.5, the 8K videos at a 36.8% lower frame rate, and the overwatch game latency increased to 284 milliseconds. Things got better when connected over 5GHz, with a 115.5 FPS seen with no background video streaming, which dropped to 45.1 when we added the videos and left out QoS, which increased back to 96.2 FPS with the QoS turned on. However, we measured higher gaming latencies than wired, such as 295 milliseconds with a congested network and QoS enabled. As is often the case, a wired connection is the superior route for fast-paced gameplay.
Pricing and bottom line
The big advantage of the Archer A7 AC1750 is the price. The suggested retail price is $59.99, and we found prices even a few dollars lower at the major retailers, which is certainly affordable. While the performance we measured isn’t industry-leading, it’s pretty respectable considering the price. This makes it ideal for those who care more about price than future-proofing or advanced features. At this price point, it’s also a good option to keep as a backup, so you don’t have to rush to the store to buy something expensive if your main router suddenly dies.
The Archer A7 is a solid choice, benefiting from decent 5GHz throughput, high FPS scores on wired congestion, and most importantly, the price. Weaknesses include the lack of security features (not surprising at this price), weak 2.4GHz throughput, and 802.11ac only, which limits support to WPA2 only for wireless encryption and means that modern and future 802.11ax devices won’t access your network at their maximum speed. That said, those looking for a budget router or an affordable backup will be well served by the Archer A7 AC1750.