Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 20:07 Post subject: What next - Asus ac68u - Netgear R7000. Advice Please?
Busy household!
Therefore,
From the ac66u to the ac68u or even the ac87u?
Or
Switch to the Netgear R7000 or even the R8000?
My overall goal is to allow all the family activity, streaming etc over my network with my 120/12 Mbps connection, while seamlessly gaming from multiple consoles simultaniously.
Any opinions would be appreciated. _________________ Asus RT-AC66U
Netgear R7000
I'm in the same situation and are looking at many of the same candidates - Netgear R7000, Linksys EA6900, Asus RT-AC87U, RT-AC68U.
It looks like the RT-AC87U is a pretty hot router. I'm leaning in that direction, but the DD-WRT port is not yet complete (or is it?). The RT-AC68U seems pretty good as well.
I'm also going to want to add a gigabit switch to the router, because I need at least 10 wired ports. I wonder if something like a Netgear GS116 can be connected to one of the LAN ports on the router and just work or if takes a lot of messing around?
Hmm, after a little more reading around the forums, Kong uses a Netgear R7000 as one of his primary development routers. It seems to be a real good router as well, gets good reviews around the net, and probably does everything I need, although it's not quite as cutting edge as something like an ASUS RT-AC87U. But, with the more direct development support, it might sway me towards the R7000. Paired up with a Netgear GS116v2 switch for all the cabled ports I want.
Netgear R700 hands down. Kong has worked on this router the most and his firmware for this router and the R6250 works very well. I know this because i have an R6250.
if you like bananas, then this firmware is like one of the best bananas you could have ever eaten.
I think I'm also being talked into a much beefier switch, like a Cisco SG300-20, primarily so I can run redundant bonded cabled connections to my NAS (the NAS has four gigabit ports and supports all that).
So, my current shopping list has the Netgear R7000 and the Cisco SG300-20. But still researching...
My vote is for the R7000. I wouldn't get an R7500 or RT-AC87U at this time, since it wouldn't be any better for me. In fact, it might not perform as well as the R7000, due to the absence of clients to take advantage of their new features. Those new routers, the R7500 and RT-AC87U may be great in the future when clients are available (to spend even more money on), but my R7000 works great with wireless-ac, wireless-n, etc., and has all the bandwidth and wireless performance I'll be needing for the next couple years (at least).
As far as the R8000 goes, again, the firmware for it has a long way to go before it will be as helpful as it should be in sorting out the clients on your network. Again, I don't see anyone needing it.
The way that I see it, the R7500 and RT-AC87U (and R8000 for that matter) are solutions looking for problems that no one has at the moment. At least no one that I know of *smile*. That's just one person's opinion, but I do feel that pretty strongly.
Joined: 29 Jul 2014 Posts: 12 Location: Seattle, USA
Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 23:29 Post subject:
MrDoh wrote:
The way that I see it, the R7500 and RT-AC87U (and R8000 for that matter) are solutions looking for problems that no one has at the moment.
That's a fair point and it's probably true for most people.
However, if you have a fairly fast Internet connection (say, greater than 25 Mbps) and you use OpenVPN then you really need the router with the fastest available CPU. That's because OpenVPN is pretty slow on most everything short of a desktop-class CPU.
The 1.4 GHz dual core CPU in the r7500 would work much better for OpenVPN than the 1 GHz dual core CPU in the r7000 (I'm guessing about 40% better ). For OpenVPN users the r7500 has the potential to be the best router on the market. Too bad it's not yet supported. _________________ Router: Linksys E1200 v2
Firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp2 (06/07/14) K26/r22000++ vpnkong