EnGenius ECW336 AP
3. The product
The overall dimensions of the product are 210mm x 210mm x 33.2 mm with 607gr of weight, making it similar to other EnGenius AP products we have already tested. The building material is good quality plastic ABS and there is no metal bottom housing as found in previous EnGenius products, probably due to cost reduction, improvements in internal design, and use of the latest Qualcomm chipsets that improve thermals and overall power efficiency.
At the top area, you will find several LEDs, indicating the product's operation speed and giving a quick look at the overall functions. Those LEDs can of course turned off, for stealth operation in case you want.
At the right area, you will find a Kensington lock, while at the bottom, the product ID label and several ports, like the reset hole, a 5.0G LAN port, and a DC 12V power input.
On the bottom label, you will find the product MAC address, S/N, and a QR code that can be used to install the product with little effort.
The EnGenius ECW336 requires a LAN connection to work (Power-over-Ethernet: 802.3at) and operate. Alternatively, you can use a 12VDC /2A Power Adapter (Not Included in the retail package.)
The ECW336 is based upon Qualcomm Networking Pro 1210 Platform, including a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 Processor with clock speed up to 2.2 GHz and houses 1Gigabyte of RAM. As an enterprise product, it requires a lot of internal power to withstand high loads and many different clients. In order to check the internals, there are four small screws at the four corners of the product and we can see a great internal design with many different antennas and a dual-side design, all internal chipsets are covered in metal shields to dispass heat and prevent interferences.
The good thermal performance was confirmed via a thermal camera measurement (Bosch Professional GTC400C) under normal working conditions, we noticed low thermal output up to 39.5 Celsius at normal 23 Celsius room temperatures.
For our tests, we used the EnGenius ECS2512FP Network Switch which is 10G capable of powering up the device and getting the maximum from a device that supports 1Gigabit WiFi networking speeds.