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overhauled101

Occasional Visitor
I am currently in the market for a new router and am currently considering the Netgear R7000 and the Asus RT-68U. I can currently get the Netgear quite cheaper than the Asus and was just wondering if there is any noticeable differences between them.
 
I find the Netgear to be superior in terms of range and performance but the stock firmware is lacking, to say the least. If you're open to alternative firmware, there are several options on the R7000, including a port of RMerlin's custom Asus firmware.

Given that you say the R7000 is considerably cheaper for you, I would probably go that route.
 
I've had numerous issues with the stock FW of the R7000 until I said "enough is enough" and installed the ASUSWRT fw mod by XVortex. Since then I've been cruising without issues and even have an uptime of 28 days.
 
I just got the Asus AC-RT68U (for 149 Euro).
The white model, nice :)

Coming from a Netgear N4500 I must admit I am looking forward to switching brand. I know Asus from motherboards for many years of self-built PC's. My current main PC has one. Very good quality and support. (Except for USB ports dying 1-by-1)

The Netgear router served alright for several years, but I am/was definitely never impressed with the firmware, its stability or config options. For the past few years evry time it lost power, I've had to factory reset and reinstall firmware. APITA.

AFAIK this Asus even supports site-to-site VPN, meaning it can set-up and keep a permanent VPN client connection to my workplace, instead of just VPN pass-through which most routers support but which requires every client PC/laptop to setup the VPN connection every time.
 
From my experience with netgear hardware they work fine but they always have buggy firmware and im also talking about their other products too. Considering the similarity of hardware of many routers now i guess its no surprise asus-wrt or merlin-wrt gets ported to them.
 
From my experience with netgear hardware they work fine but they always have buggy firmware and im also talking about their other products too. Considering the similarity of hardware of many routers now i guess its no surprise asus-wrt or merlin-wrt gets ported to them.

Yes, the R7000 has been a great piece of hardware all along, waiting for decent firmware. The buggy stock firmware initially pushed me to dd-wrt, which worked very well for me for several months. I never was able to get myself to use the stock firmware for very long...if it wasn't bugs it was just plain lack of monitoring capability and features, and I tried every new version of the stock firmware *smile*. Now there's tomato ARM, Kong's dd-wrt, and XVortex's port of RMerlin's firmware available for the R7000, all of which are better than the stock firmware in my opinion. And now that the price has been dropped, this makes the R7000 a better choice than ever. I'm using it right now with Kong's latest dd-wrt firmware and it is doing great.

Highly recommended.
 

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