Asus GT-AX11000 Gaming Router
Huge in every way.
Despite the rather huge size of this, Asus’ gargantuan gaming router only has four Gigabit Ethernet ports though there is a 2.5Gbps W/LAN port to complement the primary WAN. The main features lie inside and a quick glance at the browser-based Dash Board is instructive. The homepage displays the all the main statuses plus live graphs showing network traffic, average network pings, ping deviation(!), global game server pings plus Aura RGB lighting effects for the top logo and settings that configure a programmable button on the chassis. This is in addition to 21 other submenus.
Automated port forwarding is an impressive gaming feature. Rather than researching your favourite game’s ports and
fiddling with IP addresses, the Rapture shows you a picture of the game, lets you choose which platform(s) you’re playing it on and then prompts you to choose your device from a dropdown menu. The Game Radar section expands on the Dash Board’s mini-view where game servers in various countries are pinged for performance monitoring.
There are plenty of other networking features. One is AiProtection which provides Trend Micro-backed network security plus parental controls.
There are all kinds of network monitoring tools that are presented in a way that makes it easy to identify bandwidth hogs and roadblocks. They can also track which devices are visiting which websites which might be handy for concerned parents but gave us serious privacy concerns. There are VPN terminations, USB file server features and every other network tool you might want.
The Wi-Fi 6 performance blitzed our tests in that it managed to transmit our 115/5 cable internet connection two floors up without any need for extenders. It even did so with 1ms faster ping than rivals. However, the potential throughput is massive with the ‘11000’ moniker reflecting the (theoretical) potential megabits per second it can manage. That’s thanks to tri-band compatibility (2.4GHz plus 2x 5GHz) married to an illegal-insome-countries 160MHz frequency band. In realworld tests it was hitting 120Mbps transfers over 2.4GHz (which is around three times faster than predecessor technologies) and 500Mbps in 5GHz (which is about the same). However, if you have supporting client technology (like Wi-Fi based upon Intel’s 9260 chipset) which supports 160Mhz transmission, you can reach insane wireless transfers of almost 1200Mbps (upstream and downstream).
Unless you’ve been counting the days for such peak wireless throughput, everything about this router is overkill and not nearly worth the money. But that doesn’t mean we’re not impressed by the technology.