I've had this router for about a week now and have mixed feelings. Upon first boot I went ahead with the latest firmware update and proceeded to setup my basic network options. Nothing major, a few of the QoS features enabled, etc.. I also went ahead and plugged a 2TB portable USB3 HDD into it.
I noticed quickly that the router became quite warm to the touch, and the RAM usage was pegged at 98% (roughly 25-30MB free). File transfers via wireless with the shared drive were pretty slow, along with the fact that they became interrupted frequently when the transfer was over a few GB. Upon disconnect of the HDD, RAM use went immediately to 39%. Seems like a healthy amount of room to improve upon this aspect of use.
Continuing onto other issues... Last night I was experimenting with the network logging features to see who were my worst offenders. Shortly after enabling the traffic monitor, along with firewall packet logging, I experienced a high frequency of disconnects on both wireless and wired clients. These would occur every ~5 minutes or so, recover, and repeat. After turning the features off, stable connections were present again.
Lastly, one of the primary reasons I purchased this router was for the VPN client capability. With such strong hardware specs, surely this feature would shine! Unfortunately, after inputting all settings for my openVPN client, uploading a .opvn file and trying to activate the connection, the router simply locks up, reboots, and loses ALL configuration settings. This happened whether I used the file upload, or manual settings for VPN. Nothing I could enter resulted in the feature working. After a few rounds of this, I began to save my CFG after every change so that I wouldn't be pained with the setup a billion times over.
The only things that have been useful thus far have been the Game IPS, and QoS for time management. Neither of these I expect the router to be burdened with in terms of processor/ram consumption. So it's essentially doing what my previous routers were doing, albeit on a single device. Not the result I was after, but my hope is that firmware updates, and perhaps some magical wizarding firmware will be available soon to correct these enormous oversights in functionality by Asus.
