ASUS RT-AC86U Dual Band AC2900 Wireless Router Reviewed

[nickff]

I just picked the AC86U up today on sale. I'm finally "upgrading" my 5 year old N66U which still works fine but the household demands are getting greater. Hopefully will get it up and running by the weekend. Results to follow.

I wonder if there will ever be a chance to have the N66U support AiMesh?

I would love to know your thoughts on the switch...I am looking at doing the exact same switch.

 

[mogulman]

I posted this in another thread, but so far I'm disappointed in the RT-AC86U. I'm getting slower Wan/Lan download speeds from the internet compared with my older RT-AC1900P. Not sure if there is some magic setting I need to use.

RT-AC86U 550Mbps/42Mbps
RT-AC1900P 950Mbps/42Mbps

Both with default settings using Comcast Gig Cable modem service.

 

[maxbraketorque]

I posted this in another thread, but so far I'm disappointed in the RT-AC86U. I'm getting slower Wan/Lan download speeds from the internet compared with my older RT-AC1900P. Not sure if there is some magic setting I need to use.

RT-AC86U 550Mbps/42Mbps
RT-AC1900P 950Mbps/42Mbps

Both with default settings using Comcast Gig Cable modem service.

Same ethernet cable between modem and router used for the comparison?

 

[mogulman]

Same ethernet cable between modem and router used for the comparison?

Yeah. Same cables.

 

[maxbraketorque]

Its always interesting to see varied results. Another person recently posted that he's getting 924/924 mbps WAN/LAN with his AC86U. (https://www.snbforums.com/threads/rt-ac3100-w-2-rt-ac86u-aimesh-my-thoughts.43411/) In my LAN testing, I'm saturating my 1Gbe connection in both directions between my desktop machine and my NAS.

 

[mogulman]

Its always interesting to see varied results. Another person recently posted that he's getting 924/924 mbps WAN/LAN with his AC86U. (https://www.snbforums.com/threads/rt-ac3100-w-2-rt-ac86u-aimesh-my-thoughts.43411/) In my LAN testing, I'm saturating my 1Gbe connection in both directions between my desktop machine and my NAS.

Yeah. I found it hard to believe.
I thought it must be some setting. So I reset them both back to factory. I disconnected everything except for my single PC. I also tried Mac cloning through 86u, just in case Comcast was doing something funky because it was assigned a different internet ip. Same results.

 

[maxbraketorque]

Yeah. I found it hard to believe.
I thought it must be some setting. So I reset them both back to factory. I disconnected everything except for my single PC. I also tried Mac cloning through 86u, just in case Comcast was doing something funky because it was assigned a different internet ip. Same results.

Pulled power and backup battery from the modem? If yes, then sounds like an issue with AC86U. Hopefully ASUS can address it.

 

[mogulman]

Here are my 2 speed tests this morning. I cloned the 1900p mac to the 86u so they would get the same Comcast IP address. The 86u will go up to about 650, but not as high as the 1900p. I also did an initialize and only had 1 client connected, (set wifi to something with no one connected).

Bufferbloat is better on the 86u, yay!

Also..I ran this multiple times and multiple different ways... initialize, factory reset. Always closing browsers between runs. Always rebooting cable modem between runs. Chrome, Firefox, 1900p is always 900Mb or higher. 86u varies between 550-670 Mbps.

1900p

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/28497782

86U (with same IP/cloned MAC of 1900p)
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/28498266

 

[maxbraketorque]

Kinda funny that the overall score for the AC1900P is a "B" while its an "A+" for the AC86U. Have you tried the xfinity speed test page?

 

[mogulman]

ok...This is weird... Fully configuring everything and now my speed on the 86u is at 950Mbs. Maybe I just needed to let the thing settle. Strange. Wish I could figure out what I did to increase the speed.

I'm not sure I want to mess with it..but things I changed...DHCP reservations, IPV6, aiprotection, adaptive qos...

Maybe just randomness. Wish I hadn't wasted the last 3-4 hours of my life trying everything.

 

[hervon]

Something was wrong on your side i guess. Glad it got fixed. I keep saturating my 940/120 internet. This router has a lot of horse power.

 

[hotsauce2007]

Sometimes less is more, I had the same problem with the new FW from Asus, my ISP dropped 50%, I did a full reset and a downgrade and now I have the full speed back again with an older fw, crazy

 

[maxbraketorque]

ok...This is weird... Fully configuring everything and now my speed on the 86u is at 950Mbs. Maybe I just needed to let the thing settle. Strange. Wish I could figure out what I did to increase the speed.

I'm not sure I want to mess with it..but things I changed...DHCP reservations, IPV6, aiprotection, adaptive qos...

Maybe just randomness. Wish I hadn't wasted the last 3-4 hours of my life trying everything.

Glad its working. Gotta love 1 gpbs wan. I would like to have it but the reality is that I'm not even routinely hitting the limits of my 250 mbps service.

 

[Darcy]

Something was wrong on your side i guess. Glad it got fixed. I keep saturating my 940/120 internet. This router has a lot of horse power.

I can never run DSL reports because it gets an error with buffer bloat for some reason


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[hervon]

No problem here. A.

 

[Zentachi]

hi everyone,

I received rt-ac86u from amazon yesterday and spend the evening setting it up.
I have uploaded the latest stable release from Merlin.

There are 16 wifi, 3 wired devices and a usb 3 dock with two hard disk drives connected.

I have enabled Adaptive Qos.

I see the CPU usage being about 50% and RAM usage always on 95% with 29MB remaining.
Temps are 51C, 53C and 73C.

This is my first Asus router. Are the above values normal?

Many thanks,
Zen

 

[cc666]

hi everyone,

I received rt-ac86u from amazon yesterday and spend the evening setting it up.
I have uploaded the latest stable release from Merlin.

There are 16 wifi, 3 wired devices and a usb 3 dock with two hard disk drives connected.

I have enabled Adaptive Qos.

I see the CPU usage being about 50% and RAM usage always on 95% with 29MB remaining.
Temps are 51C, 53C and 73C.

This is my first Asus router. Are the above values normal?

Many thanks,
Zen

On the latest stock firmware my RAM usage is consistently 69-70% with 152 MB FREE. 95% doesn't
sound like a good thing.

CC

 

[maxbraketorque]

hi everyone,

I received rt-ac86u from amazon yesterday and spend the evening setting it up.
I have uploaded the latest stable release from Merlin.

There are 16 wifi, 3 wired devices and a usb 3 dock with two hard disk drives connected.

I have enabled Adaptive Qos.

I see the CPU usage being about 50% and RAM usage always on 95% with 29MB remaining.
Temps are 51C, 53C and 73C.

This is my first Asus router. Are the above values normal?

Many thanks,
Zen

QOS and hard drive usage are going to be more CPU intensive. Have you verified that QOS actually provides a benefit to you? I have zero issues with bandwidth availability, and I don't run QOS.

 

[Zentachi]

QOS and hard drive usage are going to be more CPU intensive. Have you verified that QOS actually provides a benefit to you? I have zero issues with bandwidth availability, and I don't run QOS.

QoS disabled reduced only 4-5% of the ram usage. I might disable it, if I don't see any benefit. When I disabled the media server/samba the ram usage fell to about 65-70%.
I checked also with the Asus official latest firmware 384 and had the same results. Therefore it seems that using the media server is quite intensive.

 

[maxbraketorque]

QoS disabled reduced only 4-5% of the ram usage. I might disable it, if I don't see any benefit. When I disabled the media server/samba the ram usage fell to about 65-70%.
I checked also with the Asus official latest firmware 384 and had the same results. Therefore it seems that using the media server is quite intensive.

Did you mean RAM or CPU usage? I was thinking that QOS would strongly affect CPU usage.