Pros: For what you pay, you get quite a bit. I was specifically looking for 801.q VLAN tagging and LACP, both of which it has and does well. I did not notice any noise from this switch. It normally sits in a space with three HP N40L Microservers, so it's possible that they drown it out. However, I've had it in the living room a couple of times for troubleshooting purposes, and I don't recall any obnoxious noises.

Cons: Ports shut off on this switch, seemingly at random, and won't come back on until you power-cycle the unit. The logs give no indication of why it shut them off. Then, sometimes, they don't come back. I bought my first GS716T in 2012. In the first year, it blew a port. I got it replaced under warranty, which was actually not that painful. Now, less than a year later, my replacement has also blown a port. With the advanced replacement warranty, it's not horrible. However, taking a couple of hours here and there to go through a replacement process isn't exactly trivial either. Depending on how much value you place on your time, you might want to consider a higher-quality switch. It will cost you more, but might be worth it.

Pros: Cheap.

Cons: This thing worked OK for about a month, but never better than OK. It gradually got worse. Now, it can handle ping traffic, but nothing heavier than that. It likes to show you a 300 Mbps connection rate, but actual data passage is never higher than 20 Mbps (measured with iperf) under any circumstances and will frequently drop to under 300kbps. I brought my old Actiontec DSL modem's crummy 802.11g wireless back online to compare it to this, and it performed far better under the same conditions than this thing did.

Pros: Setup is really easy. You can even configure it from a wireless connection right out of the box. If you're just doing basic Internet browsing without any local network file-sharing or streaming needs and don't want to have to follow a lot of directions, this device is probably OK.

Cons: Wireless performance is comparable to an 80211.b-only system. I tested with iperf using both wireless-to-wireless and wired-to-wired. The 2.4GHz network occasionally breaks 20Mbps but not for any amount of time. The 5GHz network is really spotty, but never exceeds 200Mbps. Tested under a variety of distances and conditions. It can get worse, but it can't get better. I have a four year old G-only ActionTec that outperforms this device in every metric under the same conditions. Even wireless-to-wireless was better, which it shouldn't be because the ActionTec isn't MIMO.

Overall Review: I've been on the hunt for a device that will handle the wireless portion of my network so I can just use my four year old ActionTec to handle my DSL uplink, as we're doing media streaming and G just doesn't cut it. Linksys is the third vendor I've looked to, and has been the worst of the three. Where the other manufacturers' devices at least performed adequately for a few weeks, performance with this device was horrible right out of the box. I'm still looking for a wireless router manufacturer that isn't just phoning it in. That vendor is clearly not Linksys.