Asus RT-AC66U router review: The best 802.11ac router on the market, so far - formanyall1985

Asus currently builds the best consumer-oriented 802.11n router—the RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless N900, which I used as a reference device to compare new 802.11ac routers against. After testing the company's $200 RT-AC66U, I believe that Asus also markets the best 802.11ac router presently available, too, though the offerings from several opposite manufacturers come close.

The sunrise RT-AC66U and the older RT-N66U look almost identical: Bucking the diligence trend of hiding antennas inside the enclosure, both of these routers provide three extractable and upgradable dipole antennas that you can reposition to fork out the best wireless performance. They're decorated to the exterior of a satin-black, diamond-plate-finish plastic enclosure. The routers sack lie planar, sit semivertically connected the provided stand, or be mounted to the wall up.

The RT-AC66U provides two USB 2.0 ports, so you give the sack attach to both a USB demanding drive and a USB printer, and so plowshare the devices over the network. I didn't evaluate try to tie a printer to the router's USB port, but the RT-AC66U was in no time at transferring files to and from an related 500MB 2.5-inch USB nasty drive. Asus is working on a new Mechanical man and iOS app called AiCloud that will enable users to sync, access, and hive away information on an attached merciless drive, exploitation a large number of devices over the Net. Update: Asus has since discharged new firmware that enables AiCloud. If you've purchased an RT-AC66U, you can download the firmware here. Accordant to Asus, AiCloud will also allow you to memory access any PC happening your wired or receiving set web from the Internet without the need to install client software on each machine. I hold non evaluated this new firmware.

Whether you plan to consumption your router to stream media, to host files, or to download files using P2P services such as BitTorrent, the RT-AC66U has you splattered. It offers DLNA and iTunes servers for video and music, FTP and Samba servers for filing cabinet hosting, a VPN pass-through for plug remote network approach, and a curriculum called Download Original for downloading Torrent files to an connected memory device, without requiring a host PC.

This treble-band router can run a 450-mbps 802.11n network on the 2.4GHz frequency dance orchestra and a 1.3-gbps 802.11ac network on the 5GHz frequency band simultaneously. The RT-AC66U I well-tried arrived from the factory with its 5GHz radio configured to deliver 80MHz of wireless bandwidth (draft 802.11ac).

Benchmarking 5GHz 802.11ac performance

I used an AVADirect laptop appointed with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M CPU, 4GB of memory, and an integrated Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-Fi arranger to run my benchmark tests. The Ultimate-N 6300 can send and receive three simultaneous 150-mbps spatial streams (450 mbps in total); most adapters are controlled to handling two (300 mbps in total). This was all the streaming I necessary to evaluate the RT-AC66U's 802.11n performance (on both the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands). To measure the router's 802.11ac performance on the 5GHz waveband, I configured a second RT-AC66U A a media bridge and connected that to the AVADirect's ethernet port.

To test the router, I positioned the guest in turn at Little Phoeb spots at heart and outside a 2800-squared-foot, cattle ranch-style home plate (distances from the router are noted in to each one chart on a lower floor). I victimized the ASCII text file IPERF benchmark (and the JPERF Coffee graphical front end designed for it). To measure the router's downlink TCP throughput, I effectuate the laptop as a server and used a desktop PC rocklike-wired to the router as the client.

At close range, with the client 9 feet away from the router and in the aforesaid room, the RT-AC66U was more than twice as fast As the reference 802.11n router, delivering TCP throughput of 466 mbps. This was the second-highest performance of the five 802.11ac routers I tested at this emplacemen (the Netgear R6300 was slightly faster).

I was popeyed to discover that the RT-AC66U performed even better when I moved the customer into the kitchen, 20 feet away from the router with one wall up 'tween. I suspect that the media bridge was being oversaturated at the nearer proximity, though the orientation of the media bridge is another variable. In the bedroom, the bridge faced the router: In the kitchen, it was perpendicular to the router. Whatever the cause, the RT-AC66U's TCP throughput jumped to a astonishing 525 mbps at this location—the fastest performance in the field by a full margin.

The next two benchmark runs took place inside my home theater. This is a room-within-a-room design, with four walls of 2-by-4 framing and drywall exclusive four walls of 2-away-6 framework and drywall, with some 6 inches of dead air and fiberglass insulation separating them. My intent was to optimize the room's acoustics, not to build a Faraday cage, just many little routers and other wireless devices have had trouble penetrating it. However, none of the 802.11ac routers I tested had any difficulty reaching the client in this way, and three of them—including the RT-AC66U—sustained TCP throughput at many than twice the rate of the credit 802.11n router. As you can see from the graph below, the Asus was the fastest of them all, at 192 mpbs.

Since many people will want to tie in the cogwheel in their home entertainment organisation to an 802.11ac network, I decided to bar TCP throughput with the media bridge inside the built-in equipment cabinet in my home theater (the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall console is constructed from cabinet-tier plyboard, including the back). The RT-AC66U's TCP throughput born by just a few megabits per second in this scenario. In fact, I found that I could wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO image of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Home Server 2011 machine in my home office to a home theatre PC in the entertainment focus on, including its high-definition soundtrack.

The RT-AC66U's performance born off only slightly when I moved the client and the media bridge to the first of my two outdoor locations, an exterior patio enclosed by three walls and one half wall with glass windows. In the real world, I doubt that anyone would try to set up a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and finding an outlet (and likely an extension cord) are besides inconvenient. Only I wished-for to see what sort of range the RT-AC66U would deliver, and I wasn't unsuccessful. It was the second base fastest (behind Netgear's R6300) among the quint routers I time-tested.

The RT-AC66U's performance was even more impressive when I moved the client and bridge out to a picnic table completely outside my menage. At this fix, the router and client were 75 feet apart and separated away three insulated interior walls, and unity insulated exterior wall clad along one side with fiber-cement lapboard. Under these conditions, the reference 802.11n router delivered TCP throughput of just 30.2 mpbs, but the RT-AC66U roared along at a humongous 125 mbps. The only thing more surprising that the number is the fact that the Asus finished in second place at this location, bested by the D-Link DIR-865L, which delivered 152 mbps.

Benchmarking 2.4GHz 802.11n carrying out

Though you can ostensibly localise the router's firmware to forcibly bond two 20MHz channels inside the 2.4GHz relative frequency band to create a single duct with 40MHz of bandwidth, the RT-AC66U automatically hardcover down to exploitation a single channel when it detected other 2.4GHz wireless networks in operation near (nevertheless, the router's microcode stubbornly indicated that IT was operating a 40-MHz channel).

I assume that this behavior is in grooming for ultimate Wi-Fi Alliance certification, since the trade group requires "good-neighbor" behaviour of this type, though the Wi-Fi Alliance has non yet implemented a authentication program for 802.11ac routers. In my opinion, the router was unnecessarily deferential. My home sits a on a 10-acre lot, and my neighbors' routers are farthest away. Commonly, my network client adapters wear't even indicate that the neighboring routers are at that place in the least.

On my 2.4GHz 802.11n bench mark tests, the RT-AC66U performed slightly below the average marks for entirely five 802.11ac routers, particularly close up (in the bedroom and kitchen tests).

When the length between the router and the client was greatest, however, the RT-AC66U bested the rest of the field, with the exception of its reference-point cousin, the RT-N66U. In the test charted below, the client and the router were 75 feet apart.

Benchmarking hardwired ethernet execution

The RT-AC66U's four-port gigabit ethernet switch performed as hoped-for, delivering TCP throughput of 943 mbps.

To value the RT-AC66U's performance as a network-attached storage device, I on-line a 500GB Western Digital My Passport USB drive to one of the router's USB ports. I used a stopwatch to sentence how long it took the unit to copy a few files from a PC to the private road over the mesh (a write test), and then I copied a few files from the USB drive to the networked PC finished the network (a read examination). The Microcomputer was hardwired to the network.

I created a large-register test by ripping a DVD (Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk to Dawn) to the PC's catchy drive. Copying this 4.29GB file from the Personal computer to the portable hard drive required 289.7 seconds (about 4 minutes, 50 seconds). This was the fastest metre of the five 802.ac routers I tested, but it was slightly slower than the cite RT-N66U 802.11n router. The D-Connec and Belkin routers were off the chart present, with scores of 1233 and 2211 seconds, respectively. I couldn't bench mark the Buffalo WZR-D1800H the least bit on this bill, because the router didn't recognize my NTFS-formatted hard beat back.

Surprisingly, the RT-AC66U was slower at copying (reading) the large charge from the USB drive than it was at writing to the crusade. But then, as the chart below makes clear, the two Asus routers were faster than most of the rest of the plain on this measure.

Unless you rip a lot of movies from DVD or Blu-beam of light discs, you'll seldom move a single large file to a hard drive attached to your router. A more common task is to move batches of teensy-weensy files back and forth crossways your electronic network. To assess each router's performance in this scenario, I created a single leaflet containing 595MB of small files (subfolders containing medicine, graphics, photos, documents, spreadsheets, and so on).

On this tax, the RT-AC66U delivered the fastest write performance of any of the 802.11ac routers I tested; it was bested single by the Asus 802.11n router I used as a point of reference point.

When it came to retrieving the batch of teensy-weensy files from an attached hard movement, no of the routers were especially fast-paced. The RT-AC66U took third office, behind the reference RT-N66U router and Netgear's R6300 802.11ac router.

Bottom railway line

Several of the new 802.11ac routers turned in superior performance happening one try out or another, only the Asus RT-AC66U was the unexceeded boilersuit. It delivered the top bench mark scores performance on two of my 802.11ac wireless tests, two of my 802.11n radiocommunication tests, and nearly every of my hardwired tests (it was part of a three-way tie up for first in that category).

The router is feature-rich, too, with DLNA compatibility for dwelling entertainment use, a built-in iTunes server, an integrated BitTorrent client, and more. And Asus has produced an attractive, easy face-end for tweaking its firmware. I wish that more router manufacturers would follow Asus's example of using external antennas that allow users to fine-tune array and performance.

If you're ready to take the engulf into 802.11ac Draft 2.0 and you don't thinker profitable top dollar, this is the router to buy.

Observe: This look back is part of a roundup. Click here to read the introduction to the story and find links to the other 802.11ac routers reviewed at the same time.

Update: This write up was updated on Sep 13 to inform readers that Asus has at present released the firmware required to make use of its AiCloud tool.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/461236/asus_rt_ac66u_the_best_802_11ac_router_on_the_market_so_far.html

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