TP-Link TL-7DR7290: teardown and bandwidth notes for Archer BE550 buyers

TP-LINK has released two BE7200 Wi-Fi 7 wireless routers. The 7DR7290 is the one I took apart; its main distinguishing feature is its unusually large number of Ethernet ports.

It has four 2.5G Ethernet ports and four 1G Ethernet ports, almost as if a 2.5G switch had been fitted inside. Because of this, its power consumption is relatively high, about the same as the XDR6080.

The power adapter is rated at 12V/3A. I measured about 9.7W with no Ethernet ports connected, 10.7W with one 2.5G WAN port connected, and around 12.9W with all four 2.5G ports connected.

Overall, the 7DR7290 uses an entirely Realtek solution, including both the CPU and the wireless chips. A summary of all the chip models is shown in Figure 2.

The CPU is the RTL8198EB, an expanded-memory version of the RTL8198E. It has two 1.2GHz cores, a three-core NPU, and four integrated Gigabit ports;

The memory is 1GB of DDR4, and the flash storage capacity is 128MB;

The RTL8194ETR supports 4x4 MIMO. At 4096-QAM and 40MHz channel width, its maximum wireless rate is 1376Mbps, and it supports up to 512 wireless clients. It supports 4T5R, or four transmit and five receive paths, with five receiving antennas to improve reception;

For 2.4GHz, there are four independent 2.4GHz FEM chips and one LAN chip. The 2.4GHz FEM chip is the Vanchip VC5333, also used by the XDR5480 v3.0 and XDR4288. The fifth receiving path is handled by Maxscend's MXD7223, which integrates an LNA and a transmit-receive switching circuit;

The 5GHz wireless chip is the RTL8934TR, also used in the 7DR6430. It supports 4x4 MIMO. At 160MHz channel width and 4096-QAM, its maximum wireless rate is 5765Mbps, and it supports 4T5R, or four transmit and five receive paths, with up to 512 wireless clients;

The 5GHz band also has an independent FEM chip, the KCT8548HE, which is a high-power FEM;

Figure 4 shows speed tests from four phones at point K. Judging from the data, the 5GHz signal is very good. The floor plan showing the router and point K is in the final image.

Figure 4 shows that roaming protocols 802.11k and 802.11v are supported by default, as are beamforming and MU-MIMO.

The price is 599 yuan. For a BE7200 with four 2.5G ports and independent high-power FEMs on both bands, it is not expensive.

However, in general, the cheaper 7DR6430 should be sufficient, unless you specifically want more 2.5G ports and somewhat better 2.4GHz and 5GHz performance.

Ethernet follow-up · October 19, 2025

The four 2.5G ports on the 7DR7290 share 5Gbps of bandwidth. Its small-packet forwarding performance surprised me.

Last time I only published the teardown, without testing small-packet forwarding or the Ethernet ports. That teardown was titled “TP-LINK 7DR7290 teardown: a replacement for the XDR5480?”

First, I used PacketMaster to test the 7DR7290 with 64-byte packets. I measured 3.55 million packets per second in one direction, short of the full 3.72Mpps.

With simultaneous forwarding in both directions, I also measured 3.55Mpps in each direction.

That was unexpected: the 7DR7270 can reach the full 3.72Mpps, while the 7DR7290 falls a little short at 3.55Mpps. It is not much of a problem, though, because the difference is small.

Next, I tested the backplane bandwidth of the four 2.5G ports.

There are four 2.5G ports. I tested all three pairings with simultaneous traffic in both directions across all four ports. Each gave 10Gbps of backplane bandwidth, which I describe as 5Gbps of total bandwidth shared by the four ports, as with the Xiaomi BE6500 and BEr6500 Pro.

AP mode produced the same result.

With bidirectional traffic between any two 2.5G ports, they reached full speed.

The above concerns bidirectional traffic. With all four ports carrying only one-way traffic, each direction also reached 2.5Gbps. Most situations do not require simultaneous traffic in both directions.

For example, port 1 is the WAN and a computer on port 3 is downloading heavily over a 2Gbps broadband connection, while a computer on port 4 uploads to a NAS on port 4. Those situations are not a problem.

That completes the small-packet forwarding and four-port 2.5G bandwidth tests. The firmware version was 1.0.8.

A teardown of the 7DR6450 will follow soon.