If you don't care about 802.11ac go for the ASUS N66 Dark Knight. It's supposed to be a better more stable router than the brand new ASUS AC66U. It's cheaper too. I like that switch. Throughput should be good, it supports jumbo frames, but there are complaints about the lifespan.
I know I'm resurrecting an old topic here, but I just got the Asus Dark Knight bfun mentioned above to replace my dying Buffalo G router, and it is indeed excellent and by far the best consumer level router I've used. The thing is fast, rock solid stable with its 256mb RAM and Broadcom chipset, and has great range with its three antennae. The stock firmware is surprisingly good (it's based on Tomato) and is updated regularly, or it can run DD-WRT or Tomato. My wifi speeds more than doubled, which was to be expected, but I wasn't expecting my wired speeds to also dramatically improve. I went from 42Mbit down on speedtest.net to 55Mbit down. That's like upgrading speed tiers just by swapping routers. I nearly bought the new AC Apple Airport Extreme, but was put off by the fact that AC is still draft for another year or two, and it's $60 more for a wireless standard none of my devices can even use. I was also a bit weirded out by the fact that it uses software instead of a web interface. That seems like a problem waiting to happen, especially since you need to be able to access the web to download and update the software. I could easily conceive of a situation where the router is flaking out and you can't get online to get the software you need to fix it. Anyway, anyone looking for a new router should probably just get the Dark Knight. It's rated so highly out of so many reviews on Amazon for good reason. http://www.amazon.com/RT-N66U-Dual-Band-Wireless-N900-Gigabit-Router/dp/B006QB1RPY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1371778203&sr=8-2&keywords=asus+dark+knight
Installing Apple software on windows is never a good idea as far as I am concerned. I wish we had a choice of BYO router with our cable plan, the netgear we have is flaky.
The Airports are probably fantastic if you're using all Apple stuff, and in fact the router software you need is built into OSX and iOS. I've consistently heard they're incredibly stable and reliable. Although I decided an Airport really wasn't the best idea with a bunch of windows machines.
I forgot to post. I did end up going with Bfun's recommendation... best route or all time! Of all time! The range on this thing is excellent. Speedtest across the home at the furthest distance from the router via wifi are still ~95% of my total bandwidth.
I'm confused, did you go with the Dark Knight or the AC66U? The Dark Knight is awesome. Best router I've ever had.
Yeah the ASUS RT-AC66U. It's the same thing with the newer wifi. I've never had such good wifi reception ever before.