RT-N66U Need a F/W Recommendation

[anotherengineer]

Hi People, long time lurker, decided to finally sign on.

I bought myself a RT-N66U recently (3 months ago) after all the decent reviews of the router.

Out of the box is has firmware 3.0.0.4.274.

Which for me seems to be pretty stable and have good speeds and range. Most of my stuff is wired, I have the 5 Ghz radio disabled since nothing I have will utilize it. And the 2.4Ghz radio is set to N only, 20Mhz, and Ch.2, and it will max out my 80/8 connection when I do a speed test. Current up-time is going on 12 days, since there was a power failure then.

Now after a ton of reading and research, there has been a ton of updates since the firmware I am running. However I have read of people having issues with SDK6 F/W, general up-time issues with newer F/W, etc. etc.

My main question for all the RT-N66U owners out there is

-Should I update the F/W?
-Which F/W do you find has the best stability/fewest issues?
-What is the best way (proper way) to factory reset this thing afterwards?

Asus and Merlin F/W would be what I would prefer to go with.

Many Thanks.

 

[jlake]

Yes, you should update the firmware. There's way too many security vulnerabilities with the older firmware.

I'm using the latest firmware from asus website for rt-n66u. Works really well. Very stabile.
My advice would be to update to latest firmware from asus, then after a couple weeks of testing, try Merlin's latest firmware.

Use whatever reset method you want to use. They're all the same as far as end result. Your owners manual says to press the reset button for more than 5 seconds. I use the WPS reset method. Search forum details.

Be sure to reset router to defaults and reconfigure from scratch when changing between different wireless drivers on the firmware. Also, be sure to remove your old wireless profiles on computers, phones, etc.

I used to use N only, but now I leave it on auto. That's good that you set it to "20 MHz ", but usually it's best to stay with 1,6 or 11 if you can.

 

[anotherengineer]

Thanks for the reply.

The latest on Asus's website shows up for me as
ASUS RT-N66R Firmware version 3.0.0.4.374.4561

I would assume this is the latest, and the R & U don't matter?

 

[jlake]

Thanks for the reply.

The latest on Asus's website shows up for me as
ASUS RT-N66R Firmware version 3.0.0.4.374.4561

I would assume this is the latest, and the R & U don't matter?

Correct. The R and U doesn't matter. Same router.
Correct. That is the latest firmware.

 

[sm00thpapa]

R, U and W all the same router.