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Asus RT-AC66U vs Netgear R7000

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overhauled101

Occasional Visitor
I was offered this at a very good price from a friend who purchased something else and was just looking for an opinion of whether I would see any improvements in internet speed/range. With the Asus I have a few one-bar areas in the back of the house other than that it does quite good.
 
IMO, they are different class good routers. R7000 is notch up from RT-AC66U. R7000 has some 3rd party f/w choices.
 
Not sure if IPv6 is important to you but Netgear has issues with it and has not addressed the problem as of yet. Other then that i think the R-7000 is a great router.
 
I'd go with the R7000 *if* you are willing to run third-party fw, like XVortex. I own both the AC66U and the R7000 and I can say that the R7000 range is excellent compared to the AC66U, which also misses beamforming. The R7000 has better and stronger/faster hardware. I'm currently rocking 42 days of uptime without a single issue on XVortex. IPv6 also works very well for me on that fw
 
Can anyone post the PERFORMANCE and stability of current firmware of R7000 1.0.4.30 latest one.
 
How does the question change if the R7000 is compared to the RT-AC68P with the 1GHz processors?

I have a Cisco C819HWD-A-K9 ISR (more of a enterprise/business device than a home unit), but lightning must have zapped my WAN port and it's kaput so I am looking for a replacement device and although in the past I'd never buy a NetGear device, the R7000 looks impressive as does the ASUS 68P. I was getting 105+Mbps on my Comcast 105 connection via wireless.

I am running an Intel AC7200 adapter if that matters.
 
In my environment, the R7000 outperforms the AC68U on the 2.4Ghz band by a healthy margin. 5Ghz is similar.

I can't speak for the AC68P but most of the testing, including here at SNB, suggests it would be similar to the AC68U. The one area where the P has a clear advantage (due to the new CPU) is in storage performance. The wireless radios are essentially the same.
 
I assume you're well aware of the shortcomings of moving down to this class of gear... that said, you will get way better performance per dollar, for the features that actually work. But dealing with third-party firmwares become almost a prerequisite if reliability/functionality is not up to snuff (which is unfortunately is the case quite often with this stuff). Support in this space tends to be a mixed bag as well. If you have the cash, I'd just do another Cisco ISR, coupled with whatever AP floats your boat. Otherwise, perhaps go with what microchip suggested and put XVortex on an R7000 or Merlin on a 68U. Best of luck. =)
 
I assume you're well aware of the shortcomings of moving down to this class of gear... that said, you will get way better performance per dollar, for the features that actually work. But dealing with third-party firmwares become almost a prerequisite if reliability/functionality is not up to snuff (which is unfortunately is the case quite often with this stuff). Support in this space tends to be a mixed bag as well. If you have the cash, I'd just do another Cisco ISR, coupled with whatever AP floats your boat. Otherwise, perhaps go with what microchip suggested and put XVortex on an R7000 or Merlin on a 68U. Best of luck. =)

I do intend to run third party software, I am familiar with DD-WRT and the others that ran on my old Linksys WRT54G version 2, Speedboost modified with v4.71.1, Hyperwrt 2.1b1 + Thibor15c firmware :) I am a bit of a hacker being online since 1983 so playing with hardware is fun as long as I am not always having to play with it. Just so much of the reviews for these devices are years old and the bugs and the cons may have been sorted out by now. I have no desire to leave the 1900AC space at this time...

I was looking at the Linksys WRT1900AC, but the reviews have been really mixed bag.

I am a single income earner with a family of 6 now with the last born on date being 1/28/2015, dropping $650+ on another ISR is not in the cards right now :) The first one I earned through taking a 5 day class with Cisco and was a heck of a nice gift for doing so. They were over $1000 on the street at that time and closer to $1500 and mine came with the Advanced IP Services license which isn't cheap. The odd thing is I don't know how the ethernet interface died since it was behind a modem.
 
If money is tight, I wouldn't go with the WRT1900AC. Not enough there to justify the price delta, IMO. And that's coming from someone who went with the WRT1900AC over both the R7000 and the RT-AC68U.
 
If money is tight, I wouldn't go with the WRT1900AC. Not enough there to justify the price delta, IMO. And that's coming from someone who went with the WRT1900AC over both the R7000 and the RT-AC68U.

Did you test the R7000 and 68U against it? The price delta at that level is not so significant, but I just can't shell out $650 for something I can get by with for under $300 or even $200. I can play with IOS in my company lab if needed :)
 
Yes, I did. I've posted my experiences a few times here but in short:
  1. All 3 performed similarly in 5Ghz range and throughput.
  2. The R7000 and WRT1900AC were much stronger at storage throughput.
  3. The AC68U really came up short on 2.4Ghz range compared to the other two. The R7000 was more like a roller coaster - some spots were great and some were bad. If I moved the antennas, the bad spots were great but the formerly great spots were then bad. The WRT1900AC didn't have the extreme range of the R7000 but it had more even coverage with no bad spots.
 
Yes, I did. I've posted my experiences a few times here but in short:
  1. All 3 performed similarly in 5Ghz range and throughput.
  2. The R7000 and WRT1900AC were much stronger at storage throughput.
  3. The AC68U really came up short on 2.4Ghz range compared to the other two. The R7000 was more like a roller coaster - some spots were great and some were bad. If I moved the antennas, the bad spots were great but the formerly great spots were then bad. The WRT1900AC didn't have the extreme range of the R7000 but it had more even coverage with no bad spots.

Great feedback. Thanks.
 
NP. You can get a little more detail if you search the forums for R7000/WRT1900AC and my username.
 
Will do, I have a lead on a older Cisco 819 (pure wired) and a Cisco 2702i AP...I may be going this route since I am a Cisco Engineer and can configure these no problem....I am still curious what the best performance will be. Obviously for online storage I'd need to add either a real NAS or a ethernet to USB storage adapter.
 
Personally if you can get a real NAS and go with purpose-built networking gear like Cisco, that's the ideal setup IMHO.
 
I have no issues with R7000 and IPv6 with Comcast.
Not sure if IPv6 is important to you but Netgear has issues with it and has not addressed the problem as of yet. Other then that i think the R-7000 is a great router.
 
I have all 3 routers, the WRT1900AC v1, RT-AC68P, and R7000. Of these the WRT1900AC can perform the best, but there's currently not any firmware out there generally available that makes me happy, so I don't use it much. I'm also very unhappy with the rumors that Linksys has dropped support for the WRT1900AC v1 already, which steers me away from Linksys bigtime. And the price differential, Linksys has apparently gone to luxury pricing, isn't worth the difference in performance (or having to put up with firmware that is lame for a higher price) to me.

I picked the R7000 over 1.5 years ago, and while the firmware has been a bumpy road, you now have stock, tomato ARM (that's what I'm using), dd-wrt, and RMerlin on the R7000 all available and mature. All good choices with different strong points.

I have found the RT-AC68P not to stand out in any category at my place, other than RMerlin's firmware...the wireless is not as good as either the WRT1900AC or R7000. So the router that I usually use is the R7000...great performance. And the IPv6 works well with stock, dd-wrt, and tomato ARM firmware, not with RMerlin on the R7000 for me, but it works for others. My IPv6 here tends to be a pathological case, difficult for firmware developers to get working correctly. IPv6 has been working on the stock firmware for some months...I haven't tested the latest stock firmware, but I'm hearing that they've fixed their icmpv6 packet filtering problem as well.

Anyways, I'd strongly recommend the R7000 of these 3 routers from my experience.
 
Not to hijack the thread, but that's nice to hear that Tomato is finally stable on ARM-based stuff Roger. :) Just curious if you've been able to find any benchmarks on max WAN-LAN throughput? Thx for any insight there.
 

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