[SOLVED] ASUS RT-AX86U or Netgear Nighthawk RAX120?

[A1exander]

Hi all, could use some advice.

I have the chance to buy a "Netgear Nighthawk RAX120" for £256 (RRP £384, that's -30%). I was originally going to buy the "ASUS RT-AX86U" (£219.35), but now I'm stuck.

Most review sites state that the ASUS RT-AX86U is great value for money, with mesh, gaming and cybersecurity features (with consistent ASUS security updates going forward). However, the Netgear Nighthawk RAX120 is faster. Not sure about the lack of gaming, mesh or cybersecurity aspects though...

We're currently a house of two but may expand to four in a few years. I work remotely and do some gaming. Most of my main components (laptop, Sonos System, TV, etc) are connected using cat6 cables.

What are your thoughts, which should I go for?

 

[bill001g]

You have to be very careful about buying into all the hype.

Your largest issue is that most your end device if they even support wifi6 can only do 80mhz channels. Unless you buy very expensive wifi cards for your desktop they can also not take advantage of things like 4x4 mimo.
In the end most wifi6 router are barely faster than wifi5 (802.11ac) routers for most people.

The additional problem is it is almost impossible to get the 160mhz radio bands to work well because all your neighbors using any form of wifi will overlap you.

Next you have to be very careful about many of the software features. You only have a single router so mesh has no meaning. If you would ever need more coverage your mesh (ie wifi repeater) should be your very last choice.

Things like gaming and any other form of QoS only have a use if you are overloading your internet connection. This tends to only happen for people with internet connections under 50mbps. If you have a very fast internet connection you can not even turn these features on without capping your speed.
Modern routers use a hardware accelerator that lets NAT traffic bypass the CPU. This is how they can get gigabit speeds. If your traffic must pass through the CPU it will bottleneck at 250-300 on most routers.....and that is with the simplest rules configured.

Cybersecurty on a router is mostly a myth. All traffic is now encrypted so it can not do so called "deep packet" inspection. Even the cheapest router just by using NAT will block all unknown session coming in from the internet. You only need some kind of firewall if you are doing something like port forwarding and allowing traffic in to some kind of server.

In you case I would buy some more average router that costs $100. There are base level wifi6 routers for well under that price. Unless you know your end device can actually use the advanced wifi features it does not pay to buy them.

Since it appears most your important stuff is on ethernet (which I highly recommend) the wifi part of the router does not matter as much. Most $25 routers can do 1gbit wan/lan because of the hardware accelerators.

If you just have to spend more money buy wifi6e. That should solve the problem of all the neighbors stomping on the signals. As this gets more popular we should actually see if wifi6 live up to its promise. Right now it is being held back by all the restiictions on the 5g band and there being a lack of bandwidth.
You still must be careful about the hype. The only way they are going to get a router that can run on a gigabit connection and do fancy firewall stuff is to use a processor that is much closer in performance to a actual pc.