Holy shit! Is this electronic shortage surge pricing? Where $360 was the sale price?? Fucking $500 for a home router seems goddamned crazy.
The X6 launched at $300 in 2014. Adjust for inflation and that's $344 today. People also lost their minds about that price. Go look at the CNET review from that time. The guy has a meltdown about the price. The prices on them have been creeping up for years. Some of it is probably the chip shortage, some of it is that modern routers are more complex than the old ones, and some of it is how essential they've become so they can charge more. Good luck doing much of anything these days without an internet connection. Cable modems have also gotten super expensive. They've been $150 to $200 for a good one for awhile now.
First impressions of the Nighthawk RAX200: It has active cooling which is something I have never had on a router before. There's a little bit of fan noise when you first boot it up. It has huge vents over the CPU. It's larger than the X6 and has two enormous antennae that look like wings. They really tried to make it look like an F117 Nighthawk. It's noticeably faster and has better 5ghz range than the X6. The firmware is a more recent version of the netgear firmware than what's available for the X6 with a more modern, cleaner UI. The laptops immediately recognized that they were on Wifi 6. I haven't had any issues with it. No dropped connections or flakiness like people were reporting with early wifi 6 routers a couple of years ago. It covers my entire house with very fast wifi. Will report back in a couple of months after I've used it more. Seems like a good upgrade so far. At $360 I would say go for it. It's a legit upgrade over the Nighthawk X6. The $500 regular price is too much for it though.
You're right. Inflation adjusted that $300 for the x6 is about the same. I might buy this for me and leave everyone else on the x6 AP mode lol. Is this still considered a "home user" device, even at $500 regular price? At which price point is it better to go "prosumer" with the Ubiquiti stuff Linus is always shilling? I personally passed on it because I don't like the cloud stuff (and was proved right with a major hack!). When I got most of my house wired. My network engineer friend setup a enterprise grade Cisco switch I got for $230 on ebay. It even does traffic isolation between IoT, my home office, shared printers, etc... It's overall incomplete because ideally you need another Cisco switch at each endpoint which I haven't paid for.
It's probably more of a prosumer device at its price point. And I would take anything Linus is shilling with a grain of salt. He's like the Billy Mays or ShamWow Guy of expensive computer hardware.
Did you change your mind about WiFi 6 speeds? I was shocked to know it actually exceeds Gigabit wired... especially since I just got the wiring done lol. I wonder if 1Gbps wired is still more reliable than 1.4Mbps wifi6 for long transfers.
No. It's insanely, shockingly fast. About 1400 Mbit of actual real world throughput between the two laptops with wifi 6 adapters when moving files around. Or in terms of megabytes per second, it's at speeds similar to the read and write speeds on mechanical hard drives. It's faster than gigabit ethernet. Moving files from my desktop to the laptops is a bit slower. It's being limited by the gigabit ethernet. I think we are finally at a point where you should probably just use wifi most of the time. Even if you are gaming, torrenting, or doing huge file transfers. It took over two decades but with wifi 6 we finally have wifi that doesn't suck. Edit: I deleted my other post because I had already mentioned "super fast wifi" in another post and thought it was redundant.
Ordered an Asus rt-ax55 for the in-laws. There isn’t much info on these entry level Wifi 6 routers so I hope it’s decent. They’re supposed to be getting 200Mbs but I’m only seeing about 45Mbs out of the 10 year old Lynksys e1200 router they have.
Just Josh did some demonstrations with Wifi6(e?). I think that will be the nail in the coffin for wired in large homes. But the devices are close to $500 so I'm gonna take a wait and see approach. Found it.
The new router fixed the Wi-Fi slowness. Parts of the house that were getting less than 10MBps are now getting 200Mbps. Now I’m just trying to decide if I should use ASUS smart connect. It basically makes the 2.4 and 5ghz network look the same and then the router decides which to choose. Seems like a great idea in concept but not sure about practice. I’ve already had two reports of the connection dropping and then coming right back. I can only guess if that’s smart connect doing is thing.
It’s a conundrum. I turned it off and 5ghz just drops off a cliff for about 20% off the house. Unfortunately that 20% is where it’s needed most. 2.4 ghz is better there but still bad. I think I need a second ASUS router working as an extender. That or get one of those mesh systems.