Equal parts gaming router and one for general use at home, the RT-AX86U not only brings Multi-Gig inputs and port aggregation to the gaming party but it’s ability to boost phone and tablet games is a big plus. It may not check all the boxes for getting the best gaming router but the Asus RT-AX86U is a top performer that gets close to the magical 1Gbps mark. At any time, you can chat with a technician about a problem. There's software for iPhones and iPads as well as Android tablets and phones.Īsus provides lots of DIY support with drivers and downloads as well as an extensive FAQ section. When installing the RT-AX86U router, you have the choice of using Asus’s Web browser interface or its Asus Router phone and tablet apps. That’s a bit more than the XR1000’s $7 a year but close to the Archer AX6000’s $11.30 per year. All told, it should cost roughly $11.60 a year to operate if you pay the national average of 13 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity. When the router was moving data back and forth, it used 10.3-watts of power, about 50-percent more than the Nighthawk XR1000. There were no video glitches or audio errors. As I watched videos on an HP EliteBook Dragonfly and listened to an Internet radio station on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+, my iPad Pro was showing a baseball game and my Dell XPS 15 was moving data onto and off a file server. Over my week of using the RT-AX86U every day for everything from email and manual downloads to video viewing and gaming, it was reliable and passed the saturation test. This can’t compare to the Netgear RAX80’s 1.07Gbps and the TP-Link AX6000’s 744.7Mbps for the wall penetration test but roughly matches the Netgear XR1000’s 614.8Mbps. The RT-AX86U did well at punching a strong Wi-Fi signal through walls and ceilings, with scores of 698.5Mbps available through a wall 25-feet from the router and 615.7Mbps to a floor above. The RT-AX86U had a range of 95-feet, 10-feet short of the XR1000. That said, the TP-Link AX6000 couldn’t even maintain a connection at that distance, while the Netgear RAX80 moved 20.8Mbps and the Netgear XR1000 led the way with 75.0Mbps of bandwidth available. At this distance, the TP-Link AX6000 and Netgear Nighthawk RAX80 were well behind with throughputs of 125.4 and 142.1Mbps, respectively.Īt our terminal distance of 90-feet, the RT-AX86U was near its limit, with an average of only 7.4Mbps, barely enough for watching an HD stream. It was behind the TP-Link AX6000’s 396.7Mbps and the Linksys MR9600’s 363.3Mbps.Īt 75-feet, the RT-AX86U regained its strength, pushing out 250.1Mbps, compared to the 280.1Mbps that the XR1000 achieved. That said, the bandwidth available at 50-feet dropped to 285.3Mbps, which was just a hair ahead of the Netgear RAX80’s 271.3Mbps. That can’t compare to the Netgear Nighthawk RAX80’s 1.39Gbps maximum output, but it’s 4 percent ahead of the TP-Link AX6000 (888.2Mbps), 7 percent ahead of the Netgear Nighthawk XR1000 (859.1Mbps) and 12 percent faster than Linksys MR9600 (822.0Mbps). ![]() At 15-feet, it had a peak throughput of 929.7Mbps. Asus RT-AX86U: Performanceīased on a week of testing using Ixia’s ixChariot’s network simulation benchmark in my 100-year old 3,500-square-foot home, the Asus RT-AX86U was equal parts reliable router and gaming companion. By contrast, the Bitdefender software that Netgear includes in its Armor security offering costs $70 a year for security updates. ![]() The best part is that it includes lifetime updates to counter new threats. Called AIProtection Pro, there’s nothing to load onto your devices, because the software works in the router, behind the scenes. It’s a secure router with built-in code from Trend Micro that not only can stop intrusions but block malware from attacking your network. It can be quite a light show at night, but the router has a button for turning off the lights. ![]() There are activity indicators for each of the Ethernet ports and whether its WPS system has been engaged. Up front, the RT-AX86U has 10 white LEDs that show it’s turned on, connected to the Internet and is transmitting on the 2.4- and 5GHz bands. The RT-AX86U has switches for turning the router on or off as well as one on the side is for using the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) protocol to quickly add a device to the network. There’s also a pair of USB 3 ports for adding up to two external hard drives to the network. For speedsters, two of the network ports can be aggregated for top-speed output. That’s potentially a total of five downstream ports, one more than most provide, but three less than TP-Link’s Archer AX6000’s eight LAN ports. To that it adds four dedicated gigabit per second downstream Ethernet ports along with an extra LAN port if the Multi-Gig connection if it’s not being used. Along the back are a 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) and a 2.5Gbps Multi-Gig WAN input port for working with the latest broadband modems.
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