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Netgear R9000, an upgrade of the R7800?

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LeKeiser

Senior Member
Hello everyone :)

I've been using a Netgear R7800 for a few years now. It's running the great Voxel firmware, and it's been stable since the begining. I have about 25+ devices connected, mostly using the WiFi. Many WiFi plugs, Google Homes, Alexas, my lovely NVidia Shield, my lovely AppleTV, etc.
I even have another R7800 that I bought when I was confined at home during the Covid period, in case my main one would crash or...

Just out of curiosity, if I wanted to upgrade my router, would the R9000 be the best choice? Does it have more "power" than my R7800? Would I see a change? A good change for the future?
Looking at the R9000 because it also runs Voxel's firmware, it's a guarantee of quality :)
I'm just thinking about that upgrade. I know that I will have to reconnect everything again, a real future pain...

Thanx for your comments :)
 
In theory, it has a more powerful SoC, as it has a quad core Cortex-A15 made by Annapurna Labs (now part of Amazon) at 1.7GHz.
The R7800 has a Qualcomm dual core "Krait" based CPU that also runs at 1.7GHz and it ends up somewhere between a Cortex-A9 and an A15, but what makes it special is that it has a pair of network accelerators in addition to the main CPU cores that are offloading a lot of the network related operations. This is something the Annapurna SoCs lacks from what is known about it, but only so much information is available on those SoCs.

Both routers have the same WiFi chips, so you're not going to gain any extra WiFi related performance.
802.11ad which is supported by the R9000 mostly failed and makes no sense to have in a router today.

The only potentially useful feature the R9000 has over the R7800 imho, is the SFP+ port, but as there's only one, it's not likely to be useful unless you can use it to connect to your internet connection without any bits in-between, i.e. you have some kind of fibre based internet service that would connect directly to the R9000's SFP+ port.

If you're using the USB ports, there might be some performance improvements, but it's possible that the R7800 has seen improvements since SNB tested it back in 2016.
Yes, it has a few more Ethernet ports, but if that's useful or not, depends on if more ports are useful where the router is located or not.

Overall, I would say, don't waste your money.
 
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Hello :)
Thanx a lot of your very informative response (y)
I will then gladly keep my R7800, and all my settings :)
 
Hello :)
Thanx a lot of your very informative response (y)
I will then gladly keep my R7800, and all my settings :)
You're welcome.

It's not that the R9000 is a bad piece of kit by any means, but it was ahead its time and had features that never really became popular.
Considering the extra cost over the R7800 even though, it's just not a sensible purchase.

Let's hope Voxel decides to support some more modern hardware from Netgear, if he can.
 

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