Question TP-Link Archer AX90 vs AXE 75

[Baumber]

I am looking for a new router for wireless gaming. I know, Ethernet is better than WiFi but my gaming PC is downstairs and router is upstairs. I do not want to drill holes for Ethernet to my PC.

With that said, I am stuck between these 2 routers. My PC has the Intel AX210 WiFi card which is compatible with 6ghz WiFi. Would I be better off buying a nice wifi 6 router similar to the AX90 or should I buy an entry-level WiFi 6e router like the AXE75 to take advantage of 6ghz?

PS... please to do not recommend MOCA or powerline adapters either. I am trying to get the best wifi connection for the lowest ping possible and to support 1gig internet. My pc is about 10-15 feet away from the router so the connection is usually pretty reliable/strong.

Thanks!

 

[kanewolf]

I am looking for a new router for wireless gaming. I know, Ethernet is better than WiFi but my gaming PC is downstairs and router is upstairs. I do not want to drill holes for Ethernet to my PC.

With that said, I am stuck between these 2 routers. My PC has the Intel AX210 WiFi card which is compatible with 6ghz WiFi. Would I be better off buying a nice wifi 6 router similar to the AX90 or should I buy an entry-level WiFi 6e router like the AXE75 to take advantage of 6ghz?

PS... please to do not recommend MOCA or powerline adapters either. I am trying to get the best wifi connection for the lowest ping possible and to support 1gig internet. My pc is about 10-15 feet away from the router so the connection is usually pretty reliable/strong.

Thanks!

6Ghz penetrates walls and ceilings worse than 5Ghz. Do you currently have a very strong 5Ghz signal? If your current signal strength is medium, then 6Ghz will be worse.
And I will still recommend MoCA or powerline over any WIFI.

 

[Baumber]

6Ghz penetrates walls and ceilings worse than 5Ghz. Do you currently have a very strong 5Ghz signal? If your current signal strength is medium, then 6Ghz will be worse.
And I will still recommend MoCA or powerline over any WIFI.

My current signal with an Archer A10 is very strong. My PC maxes out the A10s wireless capabilities at the moment. Only problem I'm having is the A10 is gettting old and it's ping in game keeps getting worse than when I first bought it. Needs to be restarted every 2 days to keep the ping down.

 

[dwd999]

I am looking for a new router for wireless gaming. I know, Ethernet is better than WiFi but my gaming PC is downstairs and router is upstairs. I do not want to drill holes for Ethernet to my PC.

With that said, I am stuck between these 2 routers. My PC has the Intel AX210 WiFi card which is compatible with 6ghz WiFi. Would I be better off buying a nice wifi 6 router similar to the AX90 or should I buy an entry-level WiFi 6e router like the AXE75 to take advantage of 6ghz?

PS... please to do not recommend MOCA or powerline adapters either. I am trying to get the best wifi connection for the lowest ping possible and to support 1gig internet. My pc is about 10-15 feet away from the router so the connection is usually pretty reliable/strong.

Thanks!

It would depend on your neighborhood location. If you are in a densely populated area where there are a substantial number of other users in the 5G band, including the higher frequencies like 5.785 GHz which is basically what wifi 6 is, then it would definitely help to move to the 6E 6.135 GHz band. Note that you will need Windows 11 for this.

I live in such a neighborhood which is why I use the AXE75 and 6E, plus it was a good deal at $180. What you may want to try is one of the wifi analyzer apps in the Microsoft store and see how much wifi traffic there is on the various channels. In my case I'm all alone on the 6E band and I get much better performance than I used to get on the 5G band where there are 40 other users.

 

[Baumber]

It would depend on your neighborhood location. If you are in a densely populated area where there are a substantial number of other users in the 5G band, including the higher frequencies like 5.785 GHz which is basically what wifi 6 is, then it would definitely help to move to the 6E 6.135 GHz band. Note that you will need Windows 11 for this.

I live in such a neighborhood which is why I use the AXE75 and 6E, plus it was a good deal at $180. What you may want to try is one of the wifi analyzer apps in the Microsoft store and see how much wifi traffic there is on the various channels. In my case I'm all alone on the 6E band and I get much better performance than I used to get on the 5G band where there are 40 other users.

Each of the houses have about 1/3 acre lot size in my neighborhood. I can see others' networks from my house but the signals are rather weak.

I am currently on Windows 10 and do not intend to update to Windows 11 for a little while. I read somewhere that Intel AX210 driver 22.45.1.1 allows windows 10 to see and connect to 6ghz networks. I ordered the AXE75 from Amazon for around the same price as you. I may also order the AX90 and try them both out.

Has the AXE75 been reliable for you? Is the 6ghz network all hype or is it a noticeable improvement with regards to ping?

 

[bill001g]

There is finally getting to be more data from you more common end users rather than just likely biased review sites. It seems to be somewhat better. Until people replace more of their devices with wifi6e we are not going to know for sure.

It should in theory be better than wifi6. The key reason wifi6 is suppose to be faster than wifi5 (802.11ac) is it allows the use of 160mhz radio channels. The problem is on the 5g radio band there is not actually a unrestricted 160mhz of radio bandwidth. It conflict with things like weather radar.
The rules say if the router/device detects these signals it must drop stop using it and drop back to the 80mhz unrestricted bands. This means it is losing the key benefit that makes it faster than 802.11ac which can also use 80mhz radio. Many cheaper wifi6 routers and many end devices decided to not support this radar avoidance issue so can only run at 80mhz. They really should not have called these devices wifi6.
This leave the QAM1024 data encoding which to a point makes wifi6 faster but this very dense data encoding only work well very close to the router so it is not as much of a speed boost as the 160mhz of radio bandwidth.

The other problem with 5g is there is massive amount of other people using it. Seems every one is running triband routers and mesh systems with multiple nodes. This pretty much means every house is attempting to use all the radio bandwidth on 2.4 and 5 for themselves. Pretty much you get massive interference on every possible radio channel.

Wifi6e only real difference is it uses the 6g radio band other than that it is the same as wifi6. There is massive amounts of new bandwidth, I think 9 160mhz unrestricted radio blocks in some countries. This means you can actually use without worrying about things like weather radar. It also means for a while you can co exist with your neighbors and not overlap the same radio channels. I am sure there are going to be some people that put large numbers of mesh units in their house just for bragging rights and overlap huge amounts of the new bandwidth.

In general most people say they get somewhat better data rates using wifi6e.

Note to your original question. This is more the rates you get on speedtest rather than the ping time. The ping times are more related to how much interference you are getting. All wifi will get about 3-5ms when it is optimum. If it gets interference data will be re transmitted and it will take longer.
It really doesn't matter which kind of wifi you run they all retransmit data increasing the delay. This variation in the ping times is what causes all the trouble in games. Because the interfering signals can be as simple as someone drives past your house with a car that has wifi in it you can't predict or avoid this interference.
It has almost no effect on any other application than online games.

So maybe because there are less people using wifi6e for now it will get less interference hard to say. You can disrupt the wifi signals just by walking through a room, your body can block huge amounts of wifi signals.

Although you don't like the answer moca and powerline are going to always be a better option for online games. Even though powerline might be slower than some wifi it is much more stable. Games only need about 1mbit/sec of bandwidth but they want extremely stable ping times so the game can correctly compensate for the delay between the client and the server. If this delay constantly changes the games estimations of future in game locations is wrong and you get what appears to be lag.

 

[dwd999]

Each of the houses have about 1/3 acre lot size in my neighborhood. I can see others' networks from my house but the signals are rather weak.

I am currently on Windows 10 and do not intend to update to Windows 11 for a little while. I read somewhere that Intel AX210 driver 22.45.1.1 allows windows 10 to see and connect to 6ghz networks. I ordered the AXE75 from Amazon for around the same price as you. I may also order the AX90 and try them both out.

Has the AXE75 been reliable for you? Is the 6ghz network all hype or is it a noticeable improvement with regards to ping?

I just ran the Ookla speedtest; it says my ping times are 10 idle, 29 download and 8 upload. I think those are supposed to be good.

Any benefit that anyone receives from the 6GHz network depends on how many other users there are. In my case the benefit is substantial since there are dozens of other users in the 5GHz band and I have the entire 6GHz band to myself. There is a slight drop in signal strength with -54dBm for 5G and -60dBm for 6G. The most important thing for me is that my file transfer speeds between my computers are faster and always at a steady speed since there's no interference from neighboring signals. I wasn't planning to upgrade to Windows 11 but the poor and inconsistent wifi performance I was getting in the 5G band made it worthwhile to upgrade to Windows 11. With the 22H2 update version it works well enough for me to give up on W10.