Question Asus GT-AC5300 reviews

jerusalem

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Mar 19, 2010
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I am considering purchasing this router. The gaming features seem interesting (if they work) and I like that it has 8 ethernet ports built in. I am finding a lot of interesting mixed reviews so I am wondering if anyone has first hand experience with it. Good or bad.

Also looking for other suggestions (preferably 8x gigabit ethernet port routers) that are optimized for gaming. Thank you.
 
There really is no such thing as a gaming router. Games need almost no bandwidth so speed is not all that important. Some have some fancy QoS screens to favor game traffic but those do nothing if you have large internet connection. They only help when you have overloaded you connection and you want to say favor game traffic over netflix traffic. That may or may not be a acceptable solution....it depends if the person who want to watch netflix has the power to say their traffic is more important than game traffic.

I would just use a external switch it tends to be cheaper and allows you a wider selection of routers. Your traffic only need to go to the router if it is going to the internet. Since a switch would still have a gigabit connection it will not slow you down....and that assumes you have a gigabit internet plan.

Some of the 8 port routers were strange. They were 2 4 port switch chips connected via internal gigabit cable. This limited the amount of traffic you could transfer between the 2 groups of ports. Most 8 port switches can run all ports at 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time.
 

jerusalem

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Mar 19, 2010
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I have an 8-port ASUS switch that has done fine for me. Honestly one of the reasons i'm looking for a new router is my old one is buried in storage and I am setting up my new internet in a new home before I'll likely have it dug out. And it is quite dated so just thought of updating it to something but there is a lot more on the market now than the last time i bought a router (when 802.11ac came out).
 
Be very careful to be sure you can actually use all the fancy features on the routers. The manufactures have been selling marketing hype mostly to try to get people to buy newer routers. Most peoples older router run just as fast but the marketing guys need them to buy buy buy.

1/2 the connection is your end devices. In most cases it is the end device that limits the connection speed. Most end devices only have 2 antenna so they can not use the fancy 4x4 mimo that requires 4 antenna on both ends. Many router manufactures are also including features that are not actually part of the official wifi standards. Things like 200 instead of 150 on the 2.4g band or QAM1024. Both these give bigger number BUT only if you have that rare device that also supports it.

Just be careful and only buy router features you know you can use. Also if you have a very fast internet connection say above 250mbps a lot of the software features say QoS or firewall features can not be used. To get very high speeds router makers have push the NAT function off the main cpu. When you used some of these advanced software feature the traffic must use the cpu and your speed will be caped by the cpu.