Asus GT-AX11000 Router
Huge in every way.
Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me!” The wife had a point: even without its antennae in the recommended, partially-reclined configuration, the Rapture is a huge, ungodly beast that cannot be discretely positioned in any home. We put off mentioning the colossal $848 price tag.
Despite the dimensions, 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.
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. It’s never been easier. However, not all current games are listed so be prepared for manual entries.
The Game Radar section expands on the Dash Board’s mini-view where game servers in various countries are pinged for performance monitoring. It’s great for an at-a-glance network health check but the number of games supported is very limited and you can’t add more. Hopefully, these lists will expand quickly as the product matures.
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 tool you might want.
The Wi-Fi 6 performance blitzed our tests (we now need new 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-in-some-countries 160MHz frequency band. In real-world tests it
Automated port forwarding is an impressive gaming feature.
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.