Netgear X4S R7800 vs Pro Gaming XR500

[Azndude263]

I am upgrading to the Cox Gigablast 1GB speed service and currently own the original Nighthawk AC1900. Had to buy new modem Arris SB8200 DOCSIS 3.1 to support new service (arrive in 3 days).

Can someone help me out determining if my current router is good enough? If not, should I upgrade to the X4S or Pro Gaming XR500? The XR500 is roughly about $60 more.

My household consists of heavy streaming (Netflix, Hulu, YouTube). Some gaming PC and PS4. Lets just say about 10 devices are connected or maybe more. Thank you for helping!

 

[bill001g]

Try your current router first and see if you have issues.

Almost all modern routers are using a hardware assisted NAT feature that bypasses the CPU to get gigabit speeds. Even fairly cheap routers can get gigabit speeds using this feature.

You have to be careful when it comes to wireless. Your router is only 1/2 the connection. The end devices must also support the features. The most common one is 4x4 mimo. This means your end device must also have 4 antenna which is rare most only have 2. Then there are a bunch of non standard extensions that router manufactures are using things like 160mhz channels and QAM1024 encoding. These maybe added to a future standard but currently they are not part of any. So many devices will not support them until they are standardized.

Unless you know your end devices can use the feature it is not going to pay to spend lots of money to get them.

The next big gotcha for people that have really fast connections like yours is even though a router may have all kinds of fancy QoS and firewall feature you can not actually use them. Even simple feature like traffic utilization graphs don't work. This is because to use these you must turn off the nat acceleration so the CPU chip can see the traffic. The router is then limited by the cpu speeds. Depends a on a lot of factors but even very fast routers will cap out in the 400mbps range with most closer to 200mbps.

So when you have a high speed connection you are pretty much forced to use your router in stupid mode.

So I would see how bad your current router performs. It likely is not going to be massively different unless you have some fancy end devices.

 

[Azndude263]

I don't really have anything fancy...just a few phones, tablets, tvs and a PC with the netgeat Nighthawk wireless adapter 1900 as well

 

[bill001g]

Best to try what you have then you can always buy later if it has issues.

 

[Azndude263]

I activated the modem today and having a tiny bit of an issue. Am only getting about half of the speed when running speed test (400 - 500mbps). It is through wireless because my PC is ibside my room which is about 30 ft away from router in living room. I wonder if it is the issue with my Netgear Nighthawk 1900 (R7000) or it is the Nighthawk 1900 wireless adapter

 

[bill001g]

That is a great speed for wifi. It is well above the average speeds for the best routers

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/119-5-ghz-profile-dn/35

 

[Azndude263]

So it's because my router nor my wireless adapter that is the limiting factor but it's just wireless itself? There is no way to boost the speed without going hardwired with Ethernet cable?

 

[bill001g]

Yup purely a technology limitation. The wifi numbers they quote represent unrealistic conditions. This would be like calling a gigabit ethernet 2gbit because it can transmit 1gbit and receive 1gbit but ethernet can actually do that...not that there is a realistic case that would ever do that.

The vendor would never convince people to upgrade if they said pay $300 for this router and it is only 10% faster than you old one.

Getting too old and cynical I think when I see new technology and first thing I think is what lies are they telling.

 

[failboat]

So it's because my router nor my wireless adapter that is the limiting factor but it's just wireless itself? There is no way to boost the speed without going hardwired with Ethernet cable?

500Mbs is probably 3x3 or 4x4 mimo. upgrading will be difficult. there isn't a lot better.

It's not always a bad thing with large connections.
you are basically shaping your network with bottlenecks.
you won't experience bufferbloat if you never max any bottleneck.
if you put a client on 1G and it starts downloading something large it might swamp the link.

 

[Azndude263]

I just pulled out an old PC from the storage and wired to my Nighthawk R7000 and did a speedtest which came out to be around 700-800 mbps. I then tried to plug directly into the SB8200 modem but for some reason, I wasn't getting a connection. Guess even hardwired, I couldn't achieve the 1Gb or at least close to it. I wonder if it's my old outdated PC that's the problem

 

[failboat]

A lot of router's can't handle wan-> lan tcp over 900. smallnetbuilder has tests for a lot of them. 940 is about the best you can get testing with iperf3.

 

[Azndude263]

So there is nothing I can do to boost the speed? Wirelessly if course