ASUS RT-AX89X or 2nd RT-AX88U for AiMESH

[Sir Aaron]

I'm a fan of ASUS routers and have been using them for many years, upgrading from time to time. I moved to Florida in December 2018 and bought a new AT-3100 at that time. As it happened, in July of 2019, lightning struck the house and shorted the router (and anything else connected via ethernet or cable but whole house surge protector protected electronics that weren't connected to the router by wire). My insurance paid out for a new router (I had to buy a new one to get paid). So I bought a new RT-AX88U (it was actually cheaper than what I paid for the 3100 at the time).

So I have a decent sized two story home. As usual, the home builder didn't put much thought into where the cable/ethernet should be run and so the box is in the laundry room upstairs. It's in the center of the house but upstairs and isn't a great location. The router pretty much has to go there since the modem is there. I could run the entire home on wireless and put the router elsewhere because I do have Cat5e wires running from the box to three locations (why didn't they use Cat6?). But I do use switches at two of the locations to run TV, etc. off of.

So short story is that from my laundry room I'm not getting great coverage to things like my Ring Doorbell and other stuff at the edge of my network range. I was thinking of buying a second router to make my network stronger. I would put the 2nd router at one of the wired locations and use it as the aimesh location and as a switch for wired components. So the 2nd router would use a wired backhaul via cat5e to the main router.

I have a couple choices. I could buy a new RT89X which is pretty expensive...$450 and then move my current 88U to the aimesh node or buy a 2nd RT-AX88U. Actuallky, I have a 3rd option, Asus fixed my 3100 under warranty so I still have that. However, I figured it would be better to have two AX routers for better speeds and future compatibility.

 

[Hawk]

I'm a fan of ASUS routers and have been using them for many years, upgrading from time to time. I moved to Florida in December 2018 and bought a new AT-3100 at that time. As it happened, in July of 2019, lightning struck the house and shorted the router (and anything else connected via ethernet or cable but whole house surge protector protected electronics that weren't connected to the router by wire). My insurance paid out for a new router (I had to buy a new one to get paid). So I bought a new RT-AX88U (it was actually cheaper than what I paid for the 3100 at the time).

So I have a decent sized two story home. As usual, the home builder didn't put much thought into where the cable/ethernet should be run and so the box is in the laundry room upstairs. It's in the center of the house but upstairs and isn't a great location. The router pretty much has to go there since the modem is there. I could run the entire home on wireless and put the router elsewhere because I do have Cat5e wires running from the box to three locations (why didn't they use Cat6?). But I do use switches at two of the locations to run TV, etc. off of.

So short story is that from my laundry room I'm not getting great coverage to things like my Ring Doorbell and other stuff at the edge of my network range. I was thinking of buying a second router to make my network stronger. I would put the 2nd router at one of the wired locations and use it as the aimesh location and as a switch for wired components. So the 2nd router would use a wired backhaul via cat5e to the main router.

I have a couple choices. I could buy a new RT89X which is pretty expensive...$450 and then move my current 88U to the aimesh node or buy a 2nd RT-AX88U. Actuallky, I have a 3rd option, Asus fixed my 3100 under warranty so I still have that. However, I figured it would be better to have two AX routers for better speeds and future compatibility.

I will try 3100 and see if it works for you, If 3100 fails I will get second rt-ac86u unless ax is important. FCC released announce expansion of 6 ghz usage, I will hold of buying ax router till end of this year, this way you will benefit from 6E Wifi Devices as well when they become available.

 

[Sir Aaron]

AX does seem to give me a performance boost on my laptop and other connected devices.

 

[Deleted member 22229]

AX does seem to give me a performance boost on my laptop and other connected devices.

Is your Laptop and other devices AX ready ? If not then your not going to see a change. A AX router in a all AC environment is truly just a AC router.

 

[L&LD]

@Kal-EL, if we could compare and otherwise identical AC vs. AX router to the same AC clients, I'm sure that statement would be 100% true.

The reality is that some current AX routers are superior in other ways to AC versions other than the WiFi specs they support. The hardware, the design (RF, etc.), and the resources the router have (NVRAM, RAM, and CPU's) all help give the latest/newest routers an edge even with only AC clients usage.

I can confirm this when I upgraded from the RT-AC86U to the RT-AX88U. While not as impressive as the gains shown on my AX clients, the AC clients also benefitted too by the upgrade to the AX class with double the RAM and double the processor cores.