Pros: Solid hardware, small compact design, low power, and a simple GUI interface.

Cons: This WAP321 is the worst Cisco product I have had the displeasure to work on, and I have been working with various Cisco equipment sense early 1999. This Cisco WAP321 hardware is very solid, but Cisco’s total lack of responsibility to fix the software stability issues has me completely dumbfounded. Looking on the Cisco forums page this reliability issue has been going on for more than two years with no resolution.

I normally do not buy small business grade Cisco gear even for home. However my wife has been gently encouraging me to lower our total carbon foot print. So I bought this WAP321. This was to replace my Cisco wireless LAN controller and five Cisco APs which is total overkill for my 2.5k sq ft house.

The setup of the WAP321 was awesomely simple, in fact much easier than the enterprise counterpart. I was up and working in less than 10 minutes. However this was short lived about every 24 hours I would lose connectivity to both the wireless radio and wired administrative interface. To fix it I would simply reboot the device, I did this for two days before researching it. First I did just a googled search on it and was shock as to how many people are having similar if not the exact same issues. Many people suggested upgrading the firmware which would make sense if there was a memory leak of similar type of bug. The factory firmware on my WAP321 is 1.0.2.3 so I upgraded it to the next rev 1.0.3.4 but the problem still persisted. I thought it might be something in my environment so I have access to a testing lab with a separate set of switches very basic configuration within a Faraday cage. (For those of you that are unfamiliar with a Faraday cage it is an enclosed space that blocks all RF from leaving or entering.) When in the Faraday cage the problem still processed. I then took the device back home and tried firmware 1.0.4.2 the problem still persisted. Then I tried firmware 1.0.4.4 this rev I got a deferent reaction the problem went from having to reboot every 24 hours to having to do it every 4 hours.

At this point I was almost ready to admit defeat and go with a deferent competitor product or continue to use my enterprise Cisco solution despite my effort to reduce my carbon foot print. I looked on Newegg site and most reports were 5 stars but looking at the date the people could have only had the firmware prior to 1.0.2.3 which is 1.0.1.10. I downgraded my firmware to the version prior to what mine was factory shipped on. It has been working on 1.0.1.10 for 30 days now no issue. I happy it is working and my carbon footprint has been reduced. I am however very concerned that as new security threats emerge that I will not be able to upgrade this until Cisco fixes this reliability issue.

Other Thoughts: I would hope Cisco fixes the firmware reliability issue.

Pros: I would like to say something good about this 9590 CPU, I know I should but it is very hard with its out of box default turbo speed instability. I will say the previous generation top of the line AMD desktop chip 8350 was very reliable both in turbo and normal modes.

Cons: Will not run stable a 100% usage at default out of the box turbo setting. To get this CPU stable I had to turn off turbo making it not exceed 4.7Ghz . I use a fairly high end custom water-cooling system that is valued at more than three times the current price of the CPU. In my opinion this is simple not acceptable and is false advertisement as far as I can determine. If you are only a gamer or just a causal user / tester this might be a great CPU. It will boot up show you 5Ghz make you feel good about yourself however it is really a “placebo extra strength.” This chip will work most of the time just don’t put it under sustain 100% load.

I use three main computers in my home office extreme hobby / recreation. The three computers currently have the following three CPUs i7-990x, AMD 9590, and lastly a i7-4960x. I not an over-clocker anymore, I find as I get older both reliability and stability are more important to me than squeezing that extra 5 to 10% . This is why I buy the highest end manufacture certified clocked CPU at the time and live with it until I need to upgrade. Until recently in my AMD rig I used to have a 8350 CPU in a Asus Sabetooth 990FX GEN3 R2 and was very happy with the results of that CPU, it worked exactly as advertised. Other than enabling memory profile timings no other setting was required on the motherboard. When I got the 9590 back in March of 2014 I just turned it on ran very few tests and turned it off. Everything seemed to work great and I assumed this is the same modern quality from AMD that I have grown to respect. So no need to run a full battery of tests. One week ago I ran some compilation batch jobs for this first time on this 9590 and as a result I got to see some of the new blue screens of death in windows 8.1. The problem is when the CPU goes to 100% for any sustained length of time and my custom batch jobs will usually last for last 4 to 6 hours on the previous 8350 CPU. On the previous generation 8350 CPU after 6 hours the CPU would never get above 42C with my current CPU liquid cooling loop for this AMD system. The new 9590 idles at 40C and after 5 minutes of 100% use it then goes to 49C and after 7 minutes of use climbs to around 55C and about the 12 minute mark it starts to fail at 59C to 60C. I switched out three different water blocks in an attempt to reduce the temp but all three types seem to preform almost the same. I used 4 different types of TIM but settled back on Arctic Silver 5. I did a lot of research on this stability issue and many people report having temperatures much high than mine so then I thought it might be a power supply issue. However I have 2 higher end 1200 watt PSU used in parallel in this system and I hooked a multi-meter and oscilloscope to the power supply providing motherboard 12v just to see confirm that it was not a voltage, or ripple issue.

Other Thoughts: Then I thought I might have a bad motherboard, RAM, and or CPU issue. So I swapped components out with my buddy who has the same AMD 9590 purchased 3 months before mine. He uses it as his primary machine so I could not test with his computer for long. He uses a Gigabyte 990fx-ud7 motherboard and has a different brand of RAM as well. First before changing anything out I ran my batch job on his computer. Not a big surprise it too also failed but his went to 60C then blue screen and rebooted almost simultaneously to not build a crash file. Then for other test I moved my custom liquid cooling solution to his computer. I removed his all-in-one AMD OEM water cooler I think it is a Corsair rebranded, after moving my cooling system to his computer we got the same results. Lastly I turned off the ability for my computer to go into “turbo” mode making the CPU not exceed 4.7Ghz, success it works perfectly 100% reliable batch jobs run 6hours and the CPU never exceed 51C. This is great except I did not buy a 4.7Ghz CPU I bought a 5Ghz CPU under turbo core mod.

The water cooling system for this AMD 9590 CPU has these components:
HX-CU1320V radiator with 8x delta 192CFM fans in push and pull configuration
1 liter Danger Den reservoir
Fluid = 80% distilled water, 18% propylene glycol, 1% Iodine, and 1% benzalkonium chloride
Tygon R-3400 ½”ID ¾ OD
Two pumps in push and pull configuration Swiftech MCP655-B
CPU block XSPC RayStrom Copper Edition

I believe my testing methods to be valid and this CPU cannot sustain 5Ghz for prolong lengths of time.