Quite frankly, I planned to return the the Wi-Fi 6 system if my benchmarks showed that it wasn’t a lot faster than what I had. I had Netgear’s Orbi RBK40 with an extra satellite, and I had no complaints. I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect such a boost, as my previous Wi-Fi system was plenty good. The Netgear RBK852 is a high-end Wi-Fi 6 mesh router plus one satellite. I even tested it by putting the client in a closet with the door closed and I still topped 100Mbps. On my porch, where I was barely getting throughput of 20Mbps, I’m now getting around 100Mbps. The bottom line is that this Wi-Fi 6 router is worth every penny. And it’s not just because of the easy setup and maintenance. Most of my client devices have dual-band (2.4- and 5GHz) network adapters onboard, and the ones with 2.4GHz-only adapters don’t need high bandwidth, so I’m OK with it. Both models are tri-band mesh systems consisting of a router and one satellite, but the Costco SKU delivers slightly less bandwidth on its 2.4GHz network: 900Mbps vs. Amazon was selling it for about $700 at this writing. And Netgear’s slightly faster Orbi RBK852-available from other retailers-is even pricier. When I wanted a speed boost, I paid for a higher-speed tier from my ISP.īut when I hooked up my new Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi 6 system (specifically, the Costco-exclusive Orbi RBK842- 1CCNAS, which set me back $550), it was like going from dial-up to broadband. And upgrading to a mesh router was easy, but it didn’t deliver a huge leap in coverage over the bridged Airport routers I was using previously (I had configured one Airport as a router, and a second as a range extender). The jump from 801.11n (Wi-Fi 4) to 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) was noticeable, but not monumental. This version is slightly better than the model I own and wrote about here, with 1.2Gbps of bandwidth on the 2.5Ghz network versus 900Mbps on the Costco model I bought.Įach time I replaced my router, the speeds and coverage boost was measurable but relatively muted. Update 3/25: Newegg is selling the Orbi WiFi 6 router for $550 today Remove non-product link, taking $150 off the MSRP with code 3FNMDS36. I had the original Apple Airport, followed by the AirPort Extreme, the Linksys WRT3200ACM, and most recently, the Netgear Orbi RBK50. Still, anywhere around $400 is a lot for a router, and while there are gaming models that cost more, our tests show performance was more good than great, and that was mostly on the 5 GHz band.As a long-time freelancer and work-from-homer, I’ve owned a lot of routers in my quest for the speediest and most pervasive possible Wi-Fi. But Costco then hides the price for members only. You may be able to find it for a bit less, as on the TP-Link site they connect the user to Costco. Despite this router coming out in 2019, the cost is north of $400 on many sites. Also realize that while the FPS is higher, the PingPlotter spikes increased to 7, and the dropped video frames increased to 36.2%, both increases over a wired connection. However, on the 5 GHz frequency, the framerate we obtained on Overwatch with the video streaming congestion of 129.3 FPS is notable as it is a higher score than we got via Ethernet. Performance was better on 5 GHz, and weak on 2.4 GHz where we experienced a large number of spikes on PingPlotter, indicative of the router not handling the network congestion well. While the frame rate in the game improved, we found the high dropped frame rate of 25.1% to be disappointing for a high-end gaming router. The game improved to 118.6 FPS when we set the QoS for gaming and toggled on the Game Accelerator. This dropped substantially to 88.1 FPS when we added the ten 8K videos to saturate our 300 Mbps connection. While connected via Ethernet, with no background videos, on our Overwatch gaming test, we measured a solid FRAPS score of 128.5 FPS. Our network congestion testing shows the AX11000 to perform better via Ethernet and 5 GHz connections, with the 2.4 GHz performance a weak point.
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