Netgear Nighthawk RAX120
Impressive Wi-Fi 6 results and features, but there’s not enough to justify the price
SCORE
PRICE £325 (£390 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk
You’d be forgiven for mistaking Netgear’s top-of-the-line Nighthawk RAX120 for the Labs-winning RAX80. Externally, the major difference is the replacement of the fifth LAN connector with a multi-gig socket. Since the first and second ports can also be aggregated into a single 2GbE link, this gives the RAX120 the rare talent of connecting two devices together at higher than gigabit speeds, without needing an external multi-gig switch.
Head to the management portal and you can route all internet traffic over a PureVPN connection – a big plus, although it would have been nicer to have a choice of providers. The QoS module also le ts you specify priority levels for different services, games or devices.
Parental controls, however, are missing in action. As with the RAX40, the Circle app doesn’t currently work with the RAX120, which leaves you with no way to apply time limits or category-based web filtering. You can take advantage of the Armor network security service, but this is $70 a year.
As for the wireless hardware, the current Wi-Fi 6 spec affords very little scope to go upwards from the RAX80. Netgear has, however, equipped the RAX120 with 8x8 MU-MIMO, meaning that four devices can use dual-stream links at once – or a single client, with suitable network hardware, can soak up the full bandwidth of eight simultaneous connections.
Our test laptop doesn’t support that degree of parallelism, however, and indeed we’ve never seen one that does. In our tests, therefore, we expected to get very similar speeds from the RAX120 as we’d got from the RAX80 – and over Wi-Fi 6 that’s just what we saw. Oddly, short-range downloads were distinctly slower over Wi-Fi 5; that might be down to a firmware issue or an effect of the different antenna arrangement.
Yet we doubt anybody’s buying this router for its Wi-Fi 5 performance. In fact, we doubt many people will be buying it at all. It delivers strong Wi-Fi 6 performance, and some technical advantages over its rivals – but when you compare it to routers at the £280 price point and even down around £150, there’s not enough extra here to warrant paying such a large premium.