D-Link DIR-X6060 AX6000 Wi-Fi 6 Router Review

The D-Link DIR-X6060 is the hero Wi-Fi 6 router from D-Link’s product portfolio in India. It promises up to 6000 Mbps across all bands and brings the latest from D-Link to you. It is a dual-band device with USB 3 for file sharing and if you have an Android phone, then you can even make use of Smart Assistants to talk to your router. Let’s look at the interesting features of the DIR-X6060.

Features

If you’ve experienced the UI of any D-Link product over the last five years then you’ll see a lot of similarity with the DIR-X6060. D-Link is still opting for the simple and concise set of configurations to reduce confusion among users. And if you happen to be a power-user and want the full breadth of configuration options then that’s present as well. The QoS engine is very much like what we recently saw in the DIR-1360 with drag-and-drop functionality. Commonly used options such as Port Forwarding, web site filtering, Dynamic DNS and VPN are also easily accessible. 

Setting up the router is quite easy. You can use a wired client or use the D-Link Wi-Fi app to scan the included QR code and the setup process will be a breeze. It continues to have support for Alexa and Google Assistant. Setting those up is also pretty simple but the commands are limited to the most commonly used functions. We would have preferred a few additional commands to toggle the VPN, disable/enable QoS or schedules. 

Build Quality

Most of the high-end D-Link devices tend to have the same crab-like design and the D-Link DIR-X6060 is no different. All flagship routers tend to be massive and bulky because the SoCs they sport are power hogs and need a lot of cooling. Some of the recent Wi-Fi 6 devices we came across had massive passive heatsinks to handle the thermals. With the DIR-X6060 we have a three-sided pyramid shape with the LED indicators along the front edge and the antennae are spread on all sides. There are eight external antennas which are all detachable and use gold plated SMA connectors, and one internal antenna for Bluetooth 4.1 which is used for communicating with other devices and for enabling the pairing functionality. There are ventilation slits on the bottom, back and the front lip. The read has the ports in the usual arrangement with one USB 3 port being prominently visible. 

On the inside, there’s a single PCB with massive black heatsinks on the top and bottom faces. The antenna connectors are mostly concentrated in the centre with a few front ends placed towards the sides. The bottom surface has nothing of importance and serves primarily to dissipate heat. We see thermal pads lining up with there the front-ends and the SoCs are placed. 

On the top side, we see that D-Link is using a Broadcom BCM43684 Wi-Fi 6 Residential Access Point chip along with 2x EtronTech EM6HE16EWXD-12H 800 MHz 256 Mbit DDR3L RAM modules and one MX30LF1G18AC 1Gbit NAND module. The BCM43684 supports four simultaneous streams in a 4x4:4 configuration. And the router uses two of these for the two different radios. For the 2.4 GHz front-ends, it is using Skyworks SKY85331-11 and for the 5 GHz front-ends we see Skyworks SKY85743-21. Lastly, the unit uses the Broadcom BCM4908 platform and the Cypress CYW20704 for Bluetooth 4.1. Overall, the DIR-X6060 is quite heavy and well-built for the class of device that it is.  

Performance

The DIR-X6060 is capable of eight simultaneous streams across both bands so the router is great for places with a lot of clients and when you throw in BSS Colouring, it becomes even better at handling a lot of clients. We ran our usual set of bandwidth tests and scored 578 Mbps downlink on the 5 GHz band and around 358 Mbps on the uplink. On the 2.4 GHz band, the uplink was around 102 Mbps and downlink was around 113 Mbps. The 5 GHz uplink test had a lot of variance compared to the downlink tests. The USB to LAN transfer speeds were decent at 18 MBps. 

Verdict

The D-Link DIR-X6060 is a great Wi-Fi 6 router that should be on every enthusiast’s wish list. It’s a great performer and the only improvement that we can suggest is for the firmware to incorporate more gaming related features that most of the competition sports. Another good thing is that this router goes for roughly `26K which makes it the most affordable flagship Wi-Fi 6 router.