It was not difficult to take the TEW-633GR apart and get to its system board. I unfastened two self-tapping screws located under the rubber feet and took off the top panel of the case. Just be careful when removing the panel so that you didn’t damage the locks that hold it in place. The router’s PCB is not fixed within the case. You can take it out of the case having first detached the wires leading to the antennas.
The PCB boasts high quality of manufacture just like the router’s case. The component mounting is very neat, there are no stains or anything on the PCB. There are also few empty seats on it.
Besides seats for two consoles which are usually not installed by the manufacturers of home network equipment, there are seats for detachable antennas and a front-panel USB connector. The rest of the empty seats are connected with the power circuitry.
The TEW-633GR is much alike to D-Link’s DIR-655 router we tested about a year ago in terms of components. Some component descriptions may coincide as the consequence.
The PCB carries a communications and media processor (CMP) from Ubicom’s StreamEngine 5000 series. Featuring a unique architecture, these processors are superior to similar processors with other architectures, at least in their manufacturer’s eyes. The TEW-633GR comes with the junior processor model marked as IP5160 which delivers as much performance as modern processors with MIPS and ARM architectures do (according to Ubicom). The manufacturer’s website offers a document that contains a detailed performance analysis of CMPs with different architectures. Here are a couple of tables demonstrating the superiority of StreamEngine 5000 processors:
Overall performance:
Routing performance:
