Router and Access Point setup

Currently I have the Asus AC68U located in my Home office (the basement). First floor (aka the living room, and three bedroom) - I have an old Dlink Dir-655 wifi router setup as an Access Point. My TV room is located in the basement, and all of those devices are hard line. The only think that is I used wifi are my iphones, ipads, and two laptops. We are mostly in the living or in the bedroom using them. The farest part of the house on first floor, the signal isnt as strong. Do you think it would be better if I turn the devices around.. using the Asus AC68U as an Access Point (wifi active) in the first floor of the house. and use the old Dlink Router in the basement as the main router (wifi active) since everything downstair are hard line, but still have wifi access. or would it be even better to just buy a newer asus router?

I would worry about running an old router as my firewall. I think there is a pending security issue with Dir-655 router which Dlink has not fixed yet. You need to keep a current router as your firewall which is up to date. I think security overrides which is the best wireless device.

I didn't even think about the firewall on the old router. Guess that's out of the question. Maybe I should just pick up a Asus AC66u to use as an Access Point....

If you have two or more LAN runs to your current AP, I would test that location with the RT-AC68U as the sole router. Having a router in the basement is not ideal.

One run to the '68U would be to the WAN and the other run would go back down to a switch in it's original location to connect the rest of your devices to. If you don't want to buy a switch to test this possibility, just use the old DLink's LAN ports for now and ignore it's wireless radio's.

I don't think you need a new router. At least not if the possibility of running another LAN cable is there.