Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 Pro
Is Asus’ massive new gaming router too much, too late?
$999 | https://rog.asus.com/au/
While Synology is owning the show for well-featured, high-performing, great-value Wi-Fi routers, Asus is also making waves. Its latest ‘gaming router’ eschews sober looks and a friendly price tag for bonkers-level speed and power. We’re also pretty sure we once saw one attack the Starship Enterprise. Can it justify the price?
The first thing to note is that this router is really, really big. With its antennae extended, it takes up about a third of a standard office desk, so think about where you might want to house it (it also totally failed the wife test). The ROG decals on the top look impressive and the adjustable RGB befits a ‘gaming router’ although we’re still not wholly convinced that a ‘gaming’ router is a thing. Still, if it’s a pseudonym for arresting looks, top-tier componentry, RGB and a massive price tag, we’re in.
Inside there’s a quad-core, 2GHz, 64-bit processor, 256MB Flash RAM, 1GB DDR4 RAM and the chassis weighs 2.18KG. So far, it sounds like a laptop. It also has eight, large, quad-channel antennae that operate across a 2.4GHz and two 5GHz bands, to offer a theoretical throughput of 11,000 Mbps. It has four Gigabit LAN ports, a 2.5GbE WAN port and the first 10GbE WAN/LAN port we’ve seen on a consumer router. There are also two USB-A ports: 3.2 Gen 1 and a USB 2.
After a simple, app-based set-up, we wasted little time running our Wi-Fi performance tests. These see us download large files to a laptop in our Sydney, weatherboard residence from the centre room. Up close, the Rapture scored a massive 825Mbps which is top-tier, but not quite first place. In the front room (two-rooms away) it scored a very impressive 508Mbps which is the fastest single router score we’ve seen – but also behind the best mesh systems. In the tricky garden test is scored a very impressive 244Mbps which rivals the top mesh systems.
Ultimately, that’s incredibly fast but we do feel that with such mighty innards, not supporting Wi-Fi 6E’s doubled bandwidth represents an unfortunate bottleneck for a Wi-Fi router that promises ultimate performance. It’s certainly impressive but Synology’s WRX650 is only a whisker behind while TP-Link’s Deco XE75E three-node mesh beats it at distance.
Still, if you’re a gamer who’s on a mission to banish latency, regardless of cost, the internals will help achieve that. They’re backed up by the well-featured Asus router phone app (with Game Mode for best QoS phone performance) and a very-well-featured desktop app with every advanced feature you could want from a consumer router – including subscription-less, Trend Micro-based network protection. It also tracks global game server performance to identify reliability issues, monitors local ping deviation, uses WTFast latency reduction and constantly prioritises gaming traffic.
Ultimately, it’s a niche market that wants to pay $1,000 for these gaming features, fast ports and performance ahead of such attractive competition: buying multiple Synologys would provide faster Wi-Fi and save you money.
Too expensive to justify, for most people, while the target market will see its upgraded sibling already on the horizon.
Nick Ross