Routers have often been an afterthought of a gaming setup. With all the latest features, such as Wi-Fi 6 (and now 6E), Beamforming, and the latest in network security, premium router prices have headed significantly north for the last several years, approaching the price of a mainstream laptop in plenty of 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 across over 38,000 reviews, clearly it’s making plenty of customers happy. So we wanted to put it through its paces in our gaming testing to see how it performs, and use it as our baseline for gaming router testing going forward.
In a world of fancy muscle cars, the TP-Link Archer A7 Router shows up like a Toyota Corolla, with the essential features, plus a little extra. We go hands-on to see what a budget router that costs around $50 can do. Is dropping the router budget this far a good way to stretch your gaming dollar, or should you look to spend more on a higher-end alternative?
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TP-Link Archer A7 Router Reviews: Design
The TP-Link Archer A7 Router sports a fairly pedestrian design, consisting of a horizontally oriented box with three spindly, external antennas. Typical of mainstream electronics, it has a gloss-black plastic exterior, with two grooves that add some visual interest along the top of the body of the router.
The back of the Archer A7 continues the simple, but functional theme. This includes, between the antenna attachment points a physical power button, a USB port, a WAN port and four Ethernet ports, and finally a WPS switch. While there’s nothing that really stands out here, all the essentials are covered.
Overall, the router is somewhat compact, even though it still takes up more space than a router with a vertical design. The dimensions are 9.57 x 6.32 x 1.28 inches (243 × 160.6 × 32.5 mm).
The TP-Link Archer A7 Router is a dual-band router, in that it can send out simultaneous 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz signals. This TP-Link Archer A7 Router is some rows back from the cutting edge, although it also costs a fraction of the price of most AX gaming routers.
There are five wired Ethernet ports, which are all Gigabit speed: one WAN, and the remaining four LAN. There is also a single USB 2.0 port for use as an FTP or media server. Again, pricier routers often have USB 3.0 ports, but a USB 2.0 port will suffice for most file transfers given the router’s limited speed.
The specs of the hardware are pretty basic as well. This includes a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9563 with an integrated 750-MHz processor. The storage is also provisioned at the basic level at 128MB of RAM and 16MB of flash storage.
TP-Link Archer A7 Router Reviews: Setup
Setup was done through the router’s website (alternately you can use the company’s Tether app), which proceeded smoothly in just a few mins. The Archer A7 can be used as either a router, an access point, or with other TP-Link OneMesh products for a whole-house mesh setup.
While it covers all the basics, the overall feature set of the TP-Link Archer A7 Router is fairly pedestrian. This includes the limitation that the newest 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 granular settings to prioritize different types of traffic. There is also support for running a VPN server.
TP-Link Archer A7 Router Reviews: Security
The TP-Link Archer A7 Router falls a bit short in the security area, with no anti-malware function to keep your network free of viruses. However, it does have the essentials that a router needs, with a firewall and DoS protection that can be adjusted among three levels.
For families with children, the Archer A7 does have some basic Parental Controls, with options for time limits and to restrict devices.
TP-Link Archer A7 Router Reviews: Performance
We put the TP-Link Archer A7 Router through our bandwidth test using NetPerf software to quantitate throughput. On the 2.4 GHz frequency, the throughput on our close test was 92 Mbps, which reduced to 51 Mbps as we moved a floor about 30 feet away, which is slower than some higher-end routers we’ve tested. The 5 GHz test had a stronger performance at the close distance at 535 Mbps, though it also dropped considerably at the longer distance to a fairly unexceptional 122 Mbps. If you need better performance at long distances from the router, stepping up to a Wi-Fi 6 router would be a good idea.
We next put the Archer A7 through our network congestion testing suite. As we added in the network congestion with the ten 8K videos, we see the FPS drop to a still playable 95.2, but with a high 43.8% dropped frame rate with the router’s QoS set to off.
| Testing Configuration | QoS | FRAPS avg | Max FPS | 8k dropped frames | Pingplotter spikes | Latency ms (Overwatch) |
| Ethernet | no | 112.3 | 137 | n/a | 0 | 71 |
| Ethernet + 10 8k videos | no | 95.2 | 134 | 43.80% | 2 | 83 |
| Ethernet + 10 8k videos | yes | 102.4 | 103 | 32.40% | 0 | 115 |
| 5 GHz | no | 115.5 | 139 | n/a | 0 | 232 |
| 5 GHz + 10 8k videos | no | 45.1 | 103 | 39.20% | 1 | 310 |
| 5 GHz + 10 8k videos | yes | 96.2 | 115 | 31.60% | 0 | 295 |
| 2.4 GHz + 10 8k videos | yes | 87.5 | 112 | 36.80% | 8 | 284 |
Connecting to the TP-Link Archer A7 Router via the 2.4 GHz with QoS enabled yielded unimpressive results, with the FPS at 87.5, the 8K videos with a 36.8% dropped frame rate, and the Overwatch game latency increased to 284 millisecs. We measured higher gaming latencies than when wired, such as 295 millisecs with the network congested and QoS enabled.
TP-Link Archer A7 Router Reviews: Pricing
The main advantage of the TP-Link Archer A7 Router is the price. At this price, it’s also a good option to keep around as a backup, so you don’t have to quickly run to the store and buy something expensive if your main router suddenly dies.
The TP-Link Archer A7 Router is a solid choice, with advantages of decent 5 GHz throughput, high FPS scores on wired congestion, and most of all, price. Weaknesses include the lack of security features (unsurprising at this price), the weak 2.4 GHz throughput, and 802.11 ac only, which limits support to WPA2 only for wireless encryption and means modern and future 802.11 ax devices won’t be able to access your network at their maximum speed.That said, those looking for a budget router or an affordable backup would be well served by the Archer A7 AC1750.
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