Linksys E8450 Router Review: A Flawed Budget Wi-Fi 6 Goodness

Linksys E8450 Dual-Band AX3200 Wi-Fi 6 Router is a breath of fresh air. This new Wi-Fi 6 router harkens back to when Linksys was one of my favorite home networking vendors, thanks to its traditional local web interface.

Indeed, it’s the first in a long time that’s no longer part of the “intelligent mesh” trend that deliberately neuters the hardware’s functionality to coerce users into surrendering their personal information via the Linksys mobile app. You buy it, and it’s yours. Pure and simple.

Unfortunately, the Linksys E8450 is far from perfect—even severely so. That’s partly because of its relatively low-end hardware and mostly due to the buggy firmware. As a result, other than the reliable Wi-Fi performance, there’s not much you can count on.

But at the current sub-$150 cost, this new Linksys Wi-Fi machine is still an excellent deal for a small home. Get it.

(The E8450 is a better version of the even lower-specced Linksys E7350 AX1800 that’s slated to be slower, albeit with the same firmware and feature set.)

Linksys E8450: Out with the new, in with the old

From the look, the Linksys E8450 seems to be a new router. It comes in a unique, eye-catching design that looks like a standing book with a shiny face. The all-plastic body, especially the front, attracts dirt easily. Not a huge deal.

At the core, the E8450 is a standard and simple router. Despite the support for Wi-Fi 6, it comes with old hardware. Really old in some aspects.

For example, besides the usual four Gigabit LAN ports and one Gigabit WAN port, the router also has a USB 2.0 port on its back. This is ridiculous, considering USB 2.0 first came out more than 20 years ago.

And there’s more.

Linksys E8450: Hardware specifications

The Linksys E8450 supposedly comes with a Wi-Fi 6 5GHz band that caps at 2408Mbps, suggesting that it’s either a 4×4 band (at 80MHz) or a 2×2 band (at 160MHz).

On the setting page, though, the router only allows for switching between the narrow 20MHz and 40MHz channel widths. It’s the only Wi-Fi 6 router I’ve seen that doesn’t have 80MHz as an option.

So, the E8450’s specs are a bit of a mystery, and Belkin is quite vague on this front.

Model	E8450
Full Name	Linksys Dual-Band AX3200 Wi-Fi 6 Router
Dimensions (Without Antennas)	6.14 x 3.03 x 8.66 inches (15.6 x 7.7 x 22 cm)
Weight	1.41 lbs (.64 kg)
Wi-Fi Technology	Dual-band Wi-Fi 6  AX3200 (800 + 2400 Mbps)
5GHz Wi-Fi Specs	4×4 AX: Up to 2408Mbps Channel Width: 20/40MHz
2.4GHz Wi-Fi Specs	Up to 800Mbps Channel Width: 20/40 MHz
Backward Compatibility	802.11a/b/g/n/ac
Wireless Security	WPA2 / WPA3
Mesh-Ready	No
Web User Interface	Yes
Mobile App	No
Login Account Requirement	No
Bridge Mode	Yes
AP Mode	No
USB Port	1x USB 2.0 (Storage)
Processing Power	1.4 GHz Dual-Core CPU, 512MB RAM,128MB Flash
Gigabit Port	4x LAN, 1x WAN
Link Aggregation	No
Dual-WAN	No
Multi-Gig Port	None

In testing, my 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 client managed to connect at 1.2Gbps (1200Mbps) of negotiated speed at best, so maybe the 80MHz was implied. (More in the performance section below.) Still, this is more like an AX2000 router than an AX3200.

That said, even the E8450’s total bandwidth is also old—low, that is. Many old Wi-Fi 5 routers can deliver more on paper.

A standard router with a good dose of nostalgia

But the old notion is not all bad. In fact, I was delighted to find out that it now uses the traditional local web user interface accessible via the router’s default IP address, which is 192.168.1.1.

As a result, you can set it up and manage it like any standard router. And the setup process was indeed straightforward. It took me less than 10 minutes to get the E8450 up and running.

All I had to do was open a browser from a connected computer, navigate it to the IP address and then follow the self-explanatory onscreen wizard.

It’s safe to say if you have worked with a standard router before, you’ll have no problem with this Linksys. Also, here’s the good news: The interface has all the goodies, including the ability to back and restore the router’s settings—Belkin removed this function from most recent Linksys routers.

What’s more, the interface brought back a sizable dose of nostalgia, for me at least. It’s similar to that of Linksys’s best Wi-Fi routers in its heyday, such as the WRT1900AC.

Indeed, the web interface was part of why I used to love Linksys’s routers when it was still an independent company and during the time Cisco owned it, from 2003 to 2013. (Subsequently, Cisco sold it to Belkin, and Foxconn bought it in 2018.)

But, again, the E8450 seems dated, and the interface itself has nothing new. Those who have never used an old Linksys router will find this menu-based UI rather primitive and tedious.

However, if you’re tired of the mobile app and login shenanigans in Linksys routers in the past couple of years, you’ll find the E8450 a welcome change. This retro approach is a push in the right direction. I hope it’ll get better in this direction.

Linksys E8450: Detail photos

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Compatibility-favored Wi-Fi settings, buggy firmware

The Linksys E8450 doesn’t have a lot of features. It comes with a standard set of settings found in most Linksys routers, including support for Dynamic DNS, port-forwarding, VLAN, etc.

The router’s Wi-Fi settings are a bit backward. Specifically, you can’t customize the hardware to deliver the best performance, just the best compatibility. It also doesn’t support WPA and older encrypting methods—you won’t be able to use many legacy clients with the E8450.

The biggest issue I experienced was the bugginess. Indeed, many of the router’s settings and features didn’t work as intended.

Let’s take the Parent Controls, dead simple yet the only notable feature, as an example. Supposedly, you can manually block up to 8 websites (such as facebook.com, youtube.com, etc.)

I tried it out, but it didn’t work at all. As it turned out, I had to restart the router before the changes were applied. But then it also blocked the sites that were not on the list at random. I had to turn it off before I could use the router more predictably.

The Linksys E8450 doesn’t allow for using channel bandwidth higher than 40MHz, and you can’t customize the setting to favor performance.

Other aspects of the router also didn’t work out well in my testing. Hopefully, this will change via firmware upgrades.

Linksys E8450: Reliable Wi-Fi performance

The Linksys E8450 did as expected in my testing. Without the support for the 160MHz (or even the 80MHz at times) channel width, you can’t expect it to be fast. But within its hardware constraints, the router did quite well.

For one, it proved reliable, as long as you use it mainly with the default settings—among other things, don’t use Parental Controls. I passed my three-day stress test with no issues at all.

The range was decent, too. If you live in a small home of 1600 ft² (149 m²), it can cover every corner. But Wi-Fi range always depends on the environment, so your mileage will vary, even by a great deal one way or the other.

Good Wi-Fi throughputs

And the Wi-Fi speeds weren’t bad at all, either. My 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 client, on the 5GHz, could connect at 1.2Gbps and registered sustained speeds of between 685Mbps and 875Mbps from up to 40 feet (12m) away.

The router did OK with Wi-Fi 5 clients, too, averaging some 660Mbps at a close range of 10 feet (3m) and some 440Mbps at 40 feet away.

On the 2.4GHz band, the Linksys E8450 did about the same as similarly-specced Wi-Fi 6 broadcasters, topping at some 85Mbps in the best-case scenario.

Considering the lackluster hardware specs, the Linksys E8450 did slightly better than my original expectations. It had nothing to wow anyone but enough to deliver good Wi-Fi speeds, fast enough for most sub-Gigabit Internet plans, in a small home.

Horrendous NAS performance

On the other hand, calling the Linksys E8450’s NAS performance when hosting a portable storage device via its USB port “terrible” would be an understatement. It was a joke in my testing.

I tested it with a couple of portable SSDs, including the WD My Passport SSD, and the sustained speeds (both read and write) never exceeded 2MB/s—that’s two megabytes per second. To put things in perspective, 20MB/s is still quite terrible for NAS performance.

Don’t bother to use this router’s USB port at all.

Conclusion

The Linksys E8450 AX3200 Wi-Fi 6 dual-band Router is a little push in the right direction by Belkin. The new router is as straightforward to use as a home router should be. It also poses no privacy concerns.

In its particular case, though, the shoddy firmware weighs it down, and the low-end hardware doesn’t help. Hopefully, things will get better via a firmware update. For now, still, you can think of its as a reliable, frill-free Wi-Fi 6 machine or a relatively small area. Get one if that’s all you need.