ASUS RT-AC5300

[sfx2000]

I would give the factory antennas a decent run first before considering any upgrades - many of the third party antennas are a poor match in any event, and I've found many that suggest 5dB (or more) and none have actually met those promises in a test environment (lab bench/RF chamber).

 

[kvic]

Regardless of the fact that the specs match the AC88U, they should still send you another unit. Whether you choose to support it or not is entirely up to you.

If you insist, ask asus to wire money to Merlin instead.

Save shipping and reduce co2 footprint is the responsible thing to do. Paris is holding perhaps the most important meeting for this century btw...

 

[RamGuy]

How does this one perform compared to the RT-AC3200? The Smart Connect on the RT-AC3200 has been horrible, to say the least. It's not even close to being anything remotely close to stable in terms of wireless performance. Disabling Smart Connect all together helps out a lot, as the wireless NIC's form Broadcom themselves are great but that pretty much defeats the whole purpose of the Tri-Band / Smart Connect design and feature set of the router and then you would be better of with a Asus RT-AC68U.

As I've had two RT-AC3200 die on me, and considering the Smart Connect is not really working at all I'm not going to get myself another RT-AC3200.. So I'm considering if it's worth awaiting the RT-AC5300 in my country, or whether to go for the RT-AC88U instead which is expected to get launched in my country any day now. If the Smart Connect is still tosh I would much rather go fort the RT-AC88U as paying extra for the RT-AC5300 is basically like tossing money out of the window at that point.


And how does the whole WTFast thing work? Is it just marketing gimmicks.

 

[sm00thpapa]

It's all marketing gimmick to steal your money. Best bet now and for the next year is stick with an AC1900 router. 4x4 and band steering is a joke.

 

[System Error Message]

the 2nd gen 4x4 is less of a joke but on 2.4Ghz it is better to use a single stream than taking up all the available 2.4Ghz space with the amount of wifi around. band steering really depends on client implementation where the client perceives a better signal rather than bandwidth

Im considering the AC88U but i havent managed to get my hands on the architectural diagrams for the AC88U and AC5300. So far ive managed to gather that ports 5-8 connect to either the CPU or switch using a 2Gb/s bidirectional link instead of 4. Other architectural problems i see with routers now that there is much faster wifi is the link 1Gb/s between the CPU and the switch chip makes the faster wifi useless when you have a mixture of clients. Im not sure if the AC5300 uses chips that connect to the switch like the AC3200 but you will need 4 GMII links at least for traffic from wifi to travel without bottlenecks on the AC5300 especially if the purpose of having 2 seperate radios to have more bandwidth for communication between wifi clients. The fault is only partially with ASUS or the manufacturer but also with broadcom for providing such a platform. Until routers provide higher bandwidth links between their components (wifi, CPU, switch) than the additional performance numbers of the components are useless as the bottleneck happens within the device. Other problems include lack of sata and SFP. VOIP also adds to the growing number of phones over internet as ISPs also provide phone lines over the internet instead of the traditional DSL lines. By not including these features in such a costly platform and eliminating bottlenecks the power and cost will increase just as GPUs (every new gen GPU is increased with a bigger price than last gen release), we will still need to rely on multiple devices which means more power usage. SFP adds flexibility which means not needing a modem. I remember a swiss ISP that provided gigabit internet before included mikrotik's router with it which even though wasnt capable of gigabit throughput had SFP on it so a seperate modem wasnt needed.

At the cost of the 5300 you can do better using an x86 platform for pfsense and some wifi cards with a multi port NIC. A multi port NIC like the intel server quad port NIC doesnt have bottlenecks between ports and CPU and it is possible for other components to actually use the card without going through the CPU. When you add wireless NICs they too dont have bottlenecks unless you use usb2 with AC wifi.

Another thing broadcom has had for a long while are hardware media acceleration chips that they do not include in their consumer platforms despite the usefulness in being a media server or even for encryption.

 

[RamGuy]

PfSense is no option as it's a real headache in terms of port mapping / forwarding, reliable upnp / nat-pmp and gaming consoles and whatnot. I did have a dedicated pfSense Server before I got my Asus RT-AC66U a few months after it's release and I haven't looked back.

PfSense is awesome and all, but it's not user-friendly in any sensible way. I managed to get everything working and it was rock solid, but dealing with a fully fledged firewall does have some downsides. Getting Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and various gaming services working 100% and automatic behind PfSense was a real drag and something I simply gave up after a while. It ended up with me having to manually port forward each and every port and service, and doing so on a home network in 2015 with all kind of devices requiring various ports open to work 100% is not something I would recommend anyway to deal with.


I did also test things Astaro / UTM Home Edition which is a much more user-friendly solution. It does require more beefy hardware compared to PfSense but in many ways its superior to the very old school "geeky" user interface and configuration of PfSense. But as most, if not all X86 based routing / firewall solutions they have a "no secure firewall should support upnp" mentality rendering it useless for home usage in my opinion. I do understand why you from a security standpoint would not want to have upnp / nat-pmp running on your firewall, but in some situations the pure convenience outshines the added security risks, especially in a home environment.


These Asus routers are simply awesome in-terms of their respective performance, ease to use firmware / GUI, and the fact that you get fully working upnp and everything you would love and need for home usage and they also come with some great QoS that PfSense etc simply cannot match and yet again it's so darn easy to setup and getting to work.

 

[System Error Message]

when asus made the ac3200 they did a good job preventing bottlenecks, not so sure with the newer ones.

 

[toor]

How does this one perform compared to the RT-AC3200? The Smart Connect on the RT-AC3200 has been horrible, to say the least. It's not even close to being anything remotely close to stable in terms of wireless performance. Disabling Smart Connect all together helps out a lot, as the wireless NIC's form Broadcom themselves are great but that pretty much defeats the whole purpose of the Tri-Band / Smart Connect design and feature set of the router and then you would be better of with a Asus RT-AC68U.

As I've had two RT-AC3200 die on me, and considering the Smart Connect is not really working at all I'm not going to get myself another RT-AC3200.. So I'm considering if it's worth awaiting the RT-AC5300 in my country, or whether to go for the RT-AC88U instead which is expected to get launched in my country any day now. If the Smart Connect is still tosh I would much rather go fort the RT-AC88U as paying extra for the RT-AC5300 is basically like tossing money out of the window at that point.


And how does the whole WTFast thing work? Is it just marketing gimmicks.

i havent tried the WTFast thing, but have been using smart connect, I'm using 2 SSIDs, one for the 2.4 and one for the 5Ghz with the 2 x 5ghz using smart connect. Its been working pretty well with the default settings; I may need to go back and tweak those settings some.

 

[dlandiss]

I don't think you told us what your client was that you used in the garage?

Is it an AC class client? How many streams / antennae? Hand held device or an AC (wall powered) laptop?

Galaxy S5 mobile phone, claims to support 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac VHT80, MIMO(2x2).

You believe that less than 10% difference is not significant. I disagree with that, in theory.

Ah, that English language again. Too many pronouns. I was speaking in the statistical sense, that is that with a relatively small population of tests sets the standard deviation is a bit wide and therefore so is the confidence interval. It's like when political pollsters say 25% support a candidate, +/- 3%.

Yes, a raw 10% increase in range would be useful if it could be verified with a narrower confidence interval.

I think the large improvements of the beamforming feature is directly related to the better design (both hardware and firmware). It just doesn't offer much when it is disabled.

I would go further and say the the features of the newer hardware and firmware support beamforming. I was hoping that better microcircuit techniques would actually provide better radio S/N ratio and thus effectively improve the range even before new tricks were added.

 

[dlandiss]

Not entirely sure, here is the only listing I found regarding the antenna on the 5300 from the manual.

Interesting! Most other sources suggest that the usual ASUS antennas are 5dBi on both bands, although I have also seen 3.5dBi quoted.

 

[L&LD]

Galaxy S5 mobile phone, claims to support 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac VHT80, MIMO(2x2).


Ah, that English language again. Too many pronouns. I was speaking in the statistical sense, that is that with a relatively small population of tests sets the standard deviation is a bit wide and therefore so is the confidence interval. It's like when political pollsters say 25% support a candidate, +/- 3%.

Yes, a raw 10% increase in range would be useful if it could be verified with a narrower confidence interval.


I would go further and say the the features of the newer hardware and firmware support beamforming. I was hoping that better microcircuit techniques would actually provide better radio S/N ratio and thus effectively improve the range even before new tricks were added.

A mobile phone? Not very convincing anymore (the tests you ran).

I am quite familiar with statistics. That is why I choose to ignore them, most of the time. Better is better, plain and simple. Statistics can be used to prove whatever the user wants, but that may have no meaning to the real world.

Political pollsters are lying to everyone. They can hide behind the mathematical 'possibility' of any possible outcome. But in reality, they have no better guess at what will come down the pike than you or I.

 

[dlandiss]

A mobile phone? Not very convincing anymore (the tests you ran).

And why would that be?

I am quite familiar with statistics.

So you know why decisions made on a small number of measurements (like "1") don't support much. With enough measurements and control of variables they can be quite accurate. As I recall they helped Nate Silver predict the outcome of the last presidential election within a couple of tenths of a percent, and get every state right.

Political pollsters are lying to everyone. They can hide behind the mathematical 'possibility' of any possible outcome. But in reality, they have no better guess at what will come down the pike than you or I.

Actually they might have a pretty good idea, but are attempting to influence support by grabbing numbers out of the air. People don't need statistics to lie, but carefully applied statistics can refute lies.

 

[kvic]

the 2nd gen 4x4 is less of a joke but on 2.4Ghz it is better to use a single stream than taking up all the available 2.4Ghz space with the amount of wifi around. band steering really depends on client implementation where the client perceives a better signal rather than bandwidth

Im considering the AC88U but i havent managed to get my hands on the architectural diagrams for the AC88U and AC5300. So far ive managed to gather that ports 5-8 connect to either the CPU or switch using a 2Gb/s bidirectional link instead of 4. Other architectural problems i see with routers now that there is much faster wifi is the link 1Gb/s between the CPU and the switch chip makes the faster wifi useless when you have a mixture of clients. Im not sure if the AC5300 uses chips that connect to the switch like the AC3200 but you will need 4 GMII links at least for traffic from wifi to travel without bottlenecks on the AC5300 especially if the purpose of having 2 seperate radios to have more bandwidth for communication between wifi clients. The fault is only partially with ASUS or the manufacturer but also with broadcom for providing such a platform. Until routers provide higher bandwidth links between their components (wifi, CPU, switch) than the additional performance numbers of the components are useless as the bottleneck happens within the device. Other problems include lack of sata and SFP. VOIP also adds to the growing number of phones over internet as ISPs also provide phone lines over the internet instead of the traditional DSL lines. By not including these features in such a costly platform and eliminating bottlenecks the power and cost will increase just as GPUs (every new gen GPU is increased with a bigger price than last gen release), we will still need to rely on multiple devices which means more power usage. SFP adds flexibility which means not needing a modem. I remember a swiss ISP that provided gigabit internet before included mikrotik's router with it which even though wasnt capable of gigabit throughput had SFP on it so a seperate modem wasnt needed.

At the cost of the 5300 you can do better using an x86 platform for pfsense and some wifi cards with a multi port NIC. A multi port NIC like the intel server quad port NIC doesnt have bottlenecks between ports and CPU and it is possible for other components to actually use the card without going through the CPU. When you add wireless NICs they too dont have bottlenecks unless you use usb2 with AC wifi.

Another thing broadcom has had for a long while are hardware media acceleration chips that they do not include in their consumer platforms despite the usefulness in being a media server or even for encryption.

An industrious masterpiece of write up god sent from a parallel universe that deserves my quote in its entirety to preserve it from ending up as junk by the planet where I'm from...

A small favor from me:

Excerpt from SNB's review of R8500 - a well written piece from planet Earth..

 

[L&LD]

And why would that be?


So you know why decisions made on a small number of measurements (like "1") don't support much. With enough measurements and control of variables they can be quite accurate. As I recall they helped Nate Silver predict the outcome of the last presidential election within a couple of tenths of a percent, and get every state right.


Actually they might have a pretty good idea, but are attempting to influence support by grabbing numbers out of the air. People don't need statistics to lie, but carefully applied statistics can refute lies.

Why? Because I don't use mobile phones to connect to any network (except for talking, of course) and for the customers that I help, I specifically tell them that the network is tuned for laptops, desktops, NAS's and any media devices they may have (wired or wireless). Hand held devices are specifically not included or guaranteed to have coverage like the other devices will.

They are not tuned for throughput or range. They are tuned for battery savings.

As for the statistics ramble, not even important enough to keep discussing (sorry).

 

[System Error Message]

An industrious masterpiece of write up god sent from a parallel universe that deserves my quote in its entirety to preserve it from ending up as junk by the planet where I'm from...

A small favor from me:
Excerpt from SNB's review of R8500 - a well written piece from planet Earth..

Thanks, as long as the link between the switch and CPU isnt limited to 1Gb/s and that wifi is connected to CPU than there wont be bottlenecks. PCIe is very efficient that you can use all the 250MB per lane.

 

[wsarahan]

Guys

I'll ask again, anyone knows a place that ships this one worldwide? Really wanna buy one of these

Thanks


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[RMerlin]

Guys

I'll ask again, anyone knows a place that ships this one worldwide? Really wanna buy one of these

Buying a router outside of your local country is usually a bad idea. You need a router that is configured for your specific region.

 

[wsarahan]

Buying a router outside of your local country is usually a bad idea. You need a router that is configured for your specific region.

Asus do not sell routers here Merlin, all my Asus routers was bought outside Brazil, since my first 66U, 87U and now the 3200 one, unfortunately that's the only way to get this products here at my country


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[doeboy]

Have you tried going to Google and typing in RT-AC5300 and then click the shopping tab? From there you can find sites that are selling them and find one that can ship it to you.

 

[wsarahan]

Have you tried going to Google and typing in RT-AC5300 and then click the shopping tab? From there you can find sites that are selling them and find one that can ship it to you.

Good idea but I need to connect to an American vpn

Using Google itself here in Brazil don't give me any matxh/ buying option, I think it takes the geolocalization right?

When I get home I'll try with a vpn the shopping button


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