Newbie - needs fastest Asus 87u network speeds

[zenpmd]

I am an audiophile (or, at least I have good speakers and love music as thats a stupid term and I dont buy into the snake oil ) and I stream flacs and blu ray files across my network. I want stability and I dont want drop outs. I bought the 87u as it looked good. At the moment I am using powerline ethernet but its not great. I need more speed, and I thought this would give me it.

I have a second 87u, currently still boxed, ready to use as a bridge. Before I unbox it, is my approach the best for top speeds? Should I be considering something else? Is there any benefit in waiting for the media bridge to come out instead and returning the 2nd router for now?

Thanks! Really grateful for some advice since although im comfortable building my own computers I am a real noob when it comes to networks.

Thanks!

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
What kinda set up do you have?, go to AVS forum? Good place to be for people like you.
I am just running Anthem receiver with 7.1 set up with all Paradigm speakers, sub is
PBS. No issues with Netgear R7500/NAS for streaming. 2 ch. set up is Quad IV and Mirage pair. Good luck at AVS forum.

 

[azazel1024]

Agreed, what is your setup? How far apart would the wifi devices be? What kind of building construction? How many walls? Etc.?

What kind of powerline adapter are you currently using and what limitations are you running in to?

 

[sfx2000]

Check the ASUS sub-forums, but there's been reports of issues with streaming at 5GHz, where dropouts are frequent.

 

[System Error Message]

I used to experience hangs everyday with AC68U but i solved it by adding a fan. Try running a stress test like iperf to see how much bandwidth you can use. In my case i managed to use more than 80% of the AC68U wireless bandwidth during stress test but file tests are slower because of overheads. Sounds like you want to run the AC87U in bridge mode. Stress them for a while to see how fast it is and see if you get any drops. I usually stress my hardware and realised how unstable windows is compared to my mikrotik router since windows produced networking issues while doing very heavy stress testing.

you can also configure your OS (doesnt matter which) to optimise for streaming. 2 notes for LAN is that TCP immediately utilises as much bandwidth as it can while UDP takes a while to utilise more bandwidth but has less overhead than TCP. Its just something to consider for your streaming server.

Ever since i modified my asus router latency has been good and there hasnt been any drops using wireless AC. Router to router should be much better since you are using the same model.

 

[RMerlin]

Nothing beats a good old Ethernet cable if stability is what you are after. Wifi is way too prone to outside interference, regardless of the router you use, and that's not mentioning the interoperability issues as well.

I'd recommend reading in the Asus AC sub-forum here before jumping into a media bridge configuration. Quite a few users experienced issues with such a setup (and Tim here wasn't even able to get two of them to work in a 4x4 configuration while reviewing the unit). It's possible the new 378_xxxx firmware that Asus just released might help with that particular scenario as it includes a new 5 GHz wireless driver - might be worth waiting a few days to see what is everyone's experience with it.

 

[zenpmd]

Thanks All.

It seems to me that the best option for now is to just use one a87u as my wireless device and then for the primary streaming between two computers use the develo 1200 powerline device. Not ideal but most likely fast enough and it gets good reviews.