A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is characterized by multi-hop wireless connectivity, frequently changing network topology with mobile nodes and the efficiency of the dynamic routing protocol plays an important role in the performance of the network. In this paper, the performance of five routing protocols for MANET is compared by using OPNET modeler: AODV, DSR, GRP, OLSR and TORA. The various performance metrics are examined, such as packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and routing overhead with varying data traffic, number of nodes and mobility. In our simulation results, OLSR shows the best performance in terms of data delivery ratio in static networks, while AODV has the best performance in mobile networks with moderate data traffic. When comparing proactive protocols (OLSR, GRP) and reactive protocols (AODV, DSR) with varying data traffic in the static networks, proactive protocols consistently presents almost constant overhead while the reactive protocols show a sharp increase to some extent. When comparing each of proactive protocols in static and mobile networks, OLSR is better than GRP in the delivery ratio while overhead is more. As for reactive protocols, DSR outperforms AODV under the moderate data traffic in static networks because it exploits caching aggressively and maintains multiple routes per destination. However, this advantage turns into disadvantage in high mobility networks since the chance of the cached routes becoming stale increases.