MSI RG60SE wireless router review.
I bought one for fun – just to see what is inside and to try to play whit it.
Price ~ 35 Euros
This picture may confuse You – this device has only one antenna on its back.
What is inside of the box – router, ac adapter and antenna, also two pages of printed documentation and a disk.
NO LAN cable! So You need to make or buy one to connect the router for first time configuration.
RG60SE front panel.
On the back side of the RG60SE router we have 4 port switch, WAN port, power in, reset button, rp-sma antenna.
RG60SE Ac adapter – output 0.8A at 9V this is the ways better than dlink or linksys strange voltages.
And finally antenna – as I said reverse polarity sma – surprise was that this is at least 5dbi antenna – whit two metal tubes and a spring, if anyone need a dimensions I will post them.
Now the fun part – let see what we have inside !
According to the speed I suspected that this is atheros device but nobody can be sure until you open and see the board.
everything open
Here it is closer look – Atheros AR2318 soc chip, interesting because Atheros do not have this chip listed in their product line. They had AR2317 which is only 54Mb as speed and it is used in WRT54G 7-th version I thing.
Here is a link to the Atheros AR5007AP-G platform – AP61
The main difference between AR2317 and AR2318 should be only the speed this is often in their products.
Block diagram and reference board. RG60SE is very closer to the Atheros reference board.
RAM chip is a 64Mbit Elpida chip, model S6416AHTA-75-E – datasheet may be fount on the Elpida page : E0439E70_EOL.pdf
Another chip Marvell 88E6060 is used for the lan part. marvell.com LinkStreet_88E6060.pdf
Last thing is the flash chip –Spansion FL016AIF, I am not sure but this should be the datasheet : s25fl016a_00_c2.pdf
So this is all about the RG60SE hardware, You can find a lot of similar devices around :
Linksys wrt54g ver.7 uses AR2317,
TP-link WR541G + uses AR2318,
So this is just a TP-Link router just neet to know which one???
Its 108mb wireless router so it must be TL-WR642G which have 3 hardware revisions.
Ver 3 has Intel flash so its defiantly not mine and it also support WDS function.
But this is for now – I still cant find LAN cable to connect to mine new router 🙂
T-link update firmwares www.everbesthk.com
Update and screenshots of RG60SE UI soon 🙂
LINKS :
Manual for RG60SE PDF file ~ 15mB
xbitlabs.com tl-wr542g_4 some of the pictures are from here.
pcpop.com some pics are from this site
