Re: Wiring a home network? I haven't had any problems, but I've hooked up a fraction of my stuff. Only about 6 things are connected vs. the nearly 30 previously on the Asus. It was an impulse purchase, so I didn't read the reviews until after I bought it. The reviews are not very good, but they do not reconcile with my experience so far. The best bang for the buck based on reviews seem to be the ASUS RT-AC68U. Although I think we can both agree the last Asus was massively over-hyped. Like I mentioned, mine had a bug where the OS would erase itself, and I'd have to download the factory reset over my 3G phone.
Re: Wiring a home network? Yeah for some reason a lot of people say the Netgears have the buggiest and ugliest firmware and interface out of most brands. The Netgear Genie on my router does look kind of simple and unorganized but all the option are there somewhere. Additionally the R8000 wasn't really any faster than the R7000 when it was released. Updated firmware may have fixed that. The R7500 was actually worse in speed test than the R7000. So there is a good chance Netgear rushes their firmware out the door. I actually think most of these home routers are just crap. I had a Buffalo die in 1 week and like 3 Linksys all die in less than a year. I know you guys have problems with your ASUS but it's the first router I've ever replaced before it went bad.
Re: Wiring a home network? Actually, once I installed Tomato and turned off 5ghz, it ran like a champ Going on 3 years now. The only reason I replaced it was the range was no longer effective (ie. this thread).
Re: Wiring a home network? Yes they are mostly crap. It sounds like I'm bitching about the ASUS, but it's still one of the better routers I've owned. I went through several different Linksys WRT models. They were okay with third party firmware, sort of. But never lasted more than two years or so before getting flaky. My Buffalo was a total POS, even with third party firmware. I also owned an expensive D-Link "gaming" router that was a complete piece of crap. I've had plenty that had issues right out of the box that I immediately returned. The "good" ones last 2-3 years before they start getting flaky. I'm not sure why they all seem to start having issues after a few years. Poor ventilation? Until very recently really slow CPUs for what they're tasked with doing? I'm not really sure. At least some of the new ones are shipping with fast ARM CPUs and big heatsinks. Some of them even have cooling fans now.
Re: Wiring a home network? Yes. I keep wondering the same thing. How do these damn things with no moving parts or even high temperatures fail so fast? It's not just a random one here or there it seems to be just about every last one of them. Planned obsolescence?
Re: Wiring a home network? I always thought they burn out from being on all the time. The Asus is the only one to make it so long. I used to rotate Linksys Tomato capables before that, and they go bad at right around the 1 year mark.
Re: Wiring a home network? The wife wants a new router so I guess this is happening. She says her laptop is getting dropped constantly. I'm torn between the AC68U and the Nighthawk X6. The Nighthawk comes with a free cable modem on Newegg, which I guess is meant to make the high price more palatable. http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Certified-Comcast-XFINITY-CM500-100NAS/dp/B00R92CEVU Supports higher speeds than my Motorola SB6120, so might be worth switching it out for the Netgear.
Re: Wiring a home network? I think if you want comparable ASUS and Netgear routers it would be RT-AC3200 vs Nighthawk X6 and RT-AC68U vs Nighthawk AC1900.
Re: Wiring a home network? The ASUS RT-AC3200 has dreadful user reviews, so I wasn't really considering it. 3/5 Newegg, 3.6/5 Amazon. The Nighthawk X6 has a 4.2/5 on Amazon and a 4/5 on Newegg. It's strange because the ASUS was better reviewed by critics, but actual users seem to think it's junk. The Nighthawk X6 had mixed critic reviews, but actual users say it's good. End users typically spend a lot more time with a router, so I tend to look more at those than critic reviews. Edit: Ordered the Nighthawk X6 with the free cable modem. The $279 price tag is a tough pill to swallow, but I feel better about it knowing that I'm also upgrading my modem at the same time. The SB6120 is pretty old (from 2009). It's DOCSIS 3, but it doesn't support the higher speed tiers. If I ever upgrade my service, I would probably need a newer modem anyway.
Re: Wiring a home network? That is a great point. I read the CNet review on the drive home from the store. They trashed it so bad I considered turning around and exchanging for the Asus. The only reason I didn't was due to the Kane & Lynch incident. Glad I got the netgear home, after running speed tests I thought I needed to hit the ER for blood thinners.
Re: Wiring a home network? They have bought and paid for reviews. I'm always a little wary of reviews I read on Gamespot and CNET.
Re: Wiring a home network? Here is my problem with the X6 or any AC3200. In almost every benchmark the r7000 is better and it's $100 less. The only speed edge the X6 has is in the 2.4Ghz range and it's like 1% faster. If you have like 4 or more people streaming over 5GHz you'll start to see the advantage of the Triband but even then the X6 has less throughput to the Internet than the r7000 so the advantage is moot if everyone is watching Netflix. It's not a bad router but netbuilder has made a point to tell people that unless you really have a good reason for AC3200 the AC1900 routers are still a better choice. But if you got a bunch of devices all streaming video from a media server in your house over 5Ghz then the AC3200 routers are what you want. Of course this is only what I've read. I don't have any experience with them. These are the charts for average speeds.
Re: Wiring a home network? It's basically this in router form We've had family functions at our house where we've had 20-30 people, many of them using the wifi. I'd rather have the tri-band and maybe not actually use it all of the time than not have it.
Re: Wiring a home network? Router manufacture sort of use misleading advertising and many people would assume AC3200 is a standard for a faster router when it's not. AC1750 is 450Mbps (2.4GHz)+ 1300Mbps(5GHz), AC1900 is 600Mbs(2.4GHz)+1300Mbps(5GHz), and AC3200 is 600Mbps(2.4GHz) + 1300MBs(5GHz) +1300Mbps(5GHz). Technically all 3 have the same 5GHz speed limit and I doubt anyone ever gets over 300Mbps on 2.4GHz so that speed bump to 600Mbps is meaningless. The actual speed and range improvements in any of these routers simply comes from better and newer components. Netgear and ASUS seem to put the best stuff in all of their equipment. Here you can see the Linksys AC3200 pretty much sucks balls. 25% slower and 30% less range than the Netgear AC3200 X6 in 5Ghz downloads. In fact the Linksys AC3200 is even slower than the Netgear AC1750 I have.
Re: Wiring a home network? Linksys isn't really Linksys these days. They're owned by Belkin, and Belkin routers have always sucked ballz.
Re: Wiring a home network? I think the issue with my Dark Knight is that it's overheating. I hadn't done any torrenting for months (my torrenting slowed down a lot when EZTV and TPB were temporarily shut down). Did some today which causes the router CPU to hit around 50-60% usage. The router immediately got extremely hot, dropped all connections (both wired and wireless), and reset itself. I could reproduce this just by starting utorrent and letting it run for a few minutes with torrents going. I guess in more casual use it was only occassionally getting hot enough to cause issues. And come to think of it, back in November right before the big torrent sites were shut down, I noticed the router would get really flaky when I was torrenting, but it wasn't this bad. That sucks because I thought I might put it up on ebay. But I'm not going to sell a router that overheats.