Need to buy a new Wireless Router Thoughts?

[hewligun]

I currently have a Linksys AC1900WRT that broke yesterday due to accidental water spill. It worked ok but would get spotty wifi at times. I have some wemo devices, nest, a few smart tv's and one TV that works as our HTPC that is wireless unfortunately. I have a NAS so I dont care much for the onboard NAS options of the routers. Pretty heavy gaming will be done as well. Before purchasing the Linksys I had a nighthawk and maybe I had early firmware but it seemed really buggy. Anyway what would you recommend is a good router for now and something that would last about 3-5 years? For the price I was thinking maybe the Nighthawk I was also looking at the Asus AC5300 even though the sticker shock is kind of high. Or I know the Asus RT-AC68U was a good router at the time. Thoughts?

 

[avtella]

Lot of options:

Cheaper but old is gold, more stable firmware:
-AC68U/R7000 should be good enough, not really outdated.

If you spend a little more:
-Netgear R7800, best 5Ghz performance/range of any consumer router, unless things changed, with a powerful Cortex A15 based CPU, nice for VPN.
-Asus AC88U, uses a similar CPU to the AC68 but higher clocked, with pretty good WiFi performance and link aggregation.
-Synology RT2600AC - similar hardware to the R7800 but has link aggregation.
-Linksys WRT1900AC - probably the best storage performance in this group.

Highest end, Tri band:
-Asus RT-AC5300 - similar to the AC88U but, an extra 5Ghz band it has. Also has link aggregation.
-Netgear R8500 - similar to the AC5300. Also has link aggregation.
-Asus GT-AC5300 - new Quad Core 64bit CPU. Newer WiFi chip than the AC88U and AC5300. Also has link aggregation.
-Netgear R9000 - Avoid this one, WiFi performance is actually a bit slower than the R7800 and 802.11ad in my opinion is not that useful.

I'm not really sold on dual 5Ghz band routers, I'd probably go for the ones in the first two lists. If you are hellbent on splurging on the highest end avoid the R9000 and get the GT-AC5300. The R9000 has a more powerful CPU but as I mentioned above the 60Ghz band is kinda useless in my opinion.

Another thing to consider is Netgear's UI is kinda bad compared to ASUS which also offers more options in its UI. Netgear has a new UI that's almost done but not yet released, it's a tremendous improvement but not sure when it will be out, as I am still in the process of testing it.

Also by buying the newest models you will also be a guinea pig as firmwares are generally not as matured compared to older models so keep that in mind when purchasing a router.

 

[pege63]

Dont forget the clients, wath are they, how many are they, which band do they support and questions like that.