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Which one to buy? NETGEAR Nighthawk R7000 or ASUS RT-AC68U?

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MariosX

New Around Here
Greetings!

At the moment I'm using an ASUS WL-500gP which I got from a friend
That router is old, it has 32MB RAM and CPU Broadcom BCM4704@264Mhz, 54Mbps WiFi and 100Mbit LAN ports.

When I started searching Google for more information about this router, I found about third party firmware: Oleg (Custom based on official ASUS firmware), dd-wrt, open-wrt, tomato etc.

To be honest, I was quite surprised with the extra features third party firmware give and I tried dd-wrt and oleg, both with optware.

In the end, I ended up using oleg with optware and now the router runs a Media Server (MediaTomb), FTP, Samba and Transmission.
However as you know, the more packages you run the slower the router gets especially with the limited hardware WL-500Gp has.

Now I am stuck between Netgear Nighthawk and ASUS RT-AC68U routers, I cannot decide which one to buy.
The reason is that I found on the Internet these facts:
  • ASUS has FTP, Samba, BT/FTP/HTTP Downloading with the official firmware where Netgear doesn't have
  • ASUS has Merlin which is a modified firmware based on ASUS official firmware
  • With the right above concern/fact I also found that third party firmwares do not have the official drivers and as the result you do not get 100% performance the hardware offers as with the official firmwares
  • However, even though ASUS has everything I've got, Netgear R7000 Nighthawk router based on reviews and benchmarks I have seen, it has better performance
  • Netgear also has it's USB 3.0 in front of the router, I have seen reports including an official one from INTEL that USB 3.0 interferes with WiFi if it is not properly shielded and that's why Netgear has it on the front to avoid any interference

Given the above concerns I would like to know the following:
  1. Is there any third party firmware for Netgear based on the official firmware which gives extra functionalities/features such as: Samba, FTP, BT/HTTP/FTP Downloading, Media Server, Web Server like ASUS WL-500gP does?
    I ask this because I would like to get the 100% perfomance the hardware offers.
  2. Does the Netgear with dd-wrt gets slower than ASUS in terms of HDD transfer speeds, WIFI etc?

For now this all I want to know.

Many thanks in advance!
 
If you want USB3 speeds, you won't get it out of the Asus, at least not to my knowledge. Unless they've corrected it post-release, the Asus lacks shielding on the USB3 port and the interference is very much present. In his review, Tim couldn't even get USB3 transfers to work until he enabled the interference mitigation mechanism, which limited transfers to USB2 speeds.

With the Netgear, you can load DD-WRT. I have not personally used it but I have seen very little anecdotal evidence that DD-WRT is any slower than stock at all. In fact, there are some very reputable and long-standing members both here and at the Netgear forums that will vouch for DD-WRT performing every bit as well as the stock firmware.

The only issue right now is with hardware acceleration on the WAN port but unless you have an Internet connection above 500Mbps, you probably won't even notice.

As far as comparative performance, it's really hard to say. Just based on my own experience with stock firmware, as well as anecdotal evidence, I would say you'll probably get slightly better wireless range out of the R7000. However, even though the R7000 had better range for me, there were spots where the AC68U had better throughput for me on the 5Ghz band. If anything, it's a wash.

For USB performance though, the R7000 comes out pretty far ahead.
 
I should also note that the previous was written with the assumption that you will load DD-WRT on the R7000.

If you don't want to do that, I would recommend the AC68U. The Netgear firmware has issues and there are still users that I know that have to reboot the router every couple of days just to get basic stability and functionality.
 

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