ASUS RoG Rapture GT-AC5300

A WELL-MADE ROUTER WITH THE BEST OF EVERYTHING.

ASUS’S MONSTROUSLY POWERFUL RT-AC5300 was one of our top picks during our last router review, and has now released the follow-up: the GT-AC5300. Essentially a tweaked version of the RT-AC5300, the GT-AC5300 is designed to be the gamer’s fantasy router, the ideal platform for minimising lag.

It’s a full AC5300 wireless router with MU-MIMO — pretty much the most powerful consumer wireless money can buy. The number of LAN ports has been increased to eight (compared to the four on the RT-5300 and most other routers) and both USB ports support USB 3.0. It’s all run on a very powerful 1.8GHz quad-core processor.

For gamers, it’s perhaps the tweaks to the software that will make the difference. ASUS has gone all-in on game optimisation. In addition to normal Quality of Service settings, two of the LAN ports are designated as gaming ports and traffic from these will receive routing priority. One of the wireless LANs can also be designated as having traffic priority for gamers and video streaming. It supports the WTFast network natively, which is a special gamer routing network, and if the router is connected to a VPN, you can designate ports that bypass it — so you can use the VPN for most traffic, but bypass it off for gaming.

All this is supported by the best firmware in the business. A port of OpenWRT, AsusWRT manages to be both user-friendly and extremely powerful, with excellent mobile apps for setup and control and features commonly found only in corporate routers (such as VPN support and USB LTE modem support).

In all, it’s an amazing router with everything a gamer could ever wish for — as long as they’re willing to pay a hefty $700 for the privilege.