- What do I even say about a router?
It's got a gig of RAM on it, so that's interesting.
ASUS sponsored this unboxing of the RT-AX86U.
And this is the first time that I have unboxed a router
in probably years at this point,
but it does have a lot of really compelling features
starting of course, with support for Wi-Fi 6.
If you're not familiar Wi-Fi 6 offers
the usual generational upgrades.
So that is to say that it goes even faster than before
with this one boasting an aggregate
5,700 megabit per second.
Of course, that will only be if you have many,
many clients connected to it
and that's a theoretical maximum speed,
you won't necessarily see that in the real world.
And like other Wi-Fi 6 devices
better handling of many, many clients.
So if you live in the kind of household
where there's a lot of people living there
or you just happen to be in especially tech heavy household
and you can't necessarily get a wire
to everywhere that you need a connect a device,
a high-end router like this one
is pretty much all you can do, sort of.
I'll touch more on that later.
First, let's get this puppy up and out.
So we've got a power cord.
Yup, that's power cord, all right.
Power cord verified.
I've got power brick.
Power cord, boom, is connected to the power brick, boom,
160 megahertz channels.
I looked into this back
when we did some videos on wireless ax or Wi-Fi 6 before
but this is the first device I've held in my hands
to my knowledge that actually supports it.
What a 160 megahertz channel allows you to do
is basically stream 1,700 megabit per second
over the air to a single client.
Of course, that's with a big asterisk
because to my knowledge, there is no client
on the planet that is capable
of actually making use of that.
With that said, one of the things that you could use it for
is as kind of like the equivalent
of a carrier back haul, but in your home.
So if you had two routers and of course,
both of them wouldn't be acting in a routing role
even if they had routing capabilities.
But if you had your main router
with its built an access point,
and then you had another access point
that could handle 160 megahertz channels,
then you could effectively suck up.
Like, I think it's something like half of the available
five gigahertz spectrum just for that link between them.
And then you could have a whole bunch of clients
over on the other side that aren't going to be bottle-necked
when they have that hop back to the main router,
that's a very high-end home setup though.
Not the kind of thing that most people
would necessarily care about.
Then again, most people need a lot of the features
of this puppy because it's kind of cray cray.
So you've got dual WAN ports.
One of them is two and a half gig
and the other one is gigabit.
So you can have, you can either aggregate
to one gig connections or go straight two and a half gig.
You've got a one gigabit, four port switch
built into the back here, two USB 3 ports.
So you can use those for adding storage
or whatever the case may be.
Of course, the reset, power and power in.
And, yeah, let's see some lights fire up here, shall we?
Oh, that's pretty cool.
You can turn off all of the lights
even the power indicator.
If you just want like a totally stealthy wifi setup.
That's not the kind of thing that I would do.
I definitely wanna know, you know,
what's connected to what, but hey if you're into it, sweet.
Oh, AiMesh mode, so, right,
I said I was gonna talk more about that later.
This unit has support for ASUS's AiMesh.
We actually made a video about that
over on my Linus Tech Tips channel.
It's pretty cool.
So a lot of other wireless networking vendors
they expect you to buy like a base unit
and then satellite units,
if you wanna extend your wireless network.
The way that ASUS handles it is upfront,
potentially more expensive
because you would use essentially full wireless routers
as your extended units.
But if you've been using a ASUS gear for a number of years
you can use older ones
and they've got support going way back years.
So you buy your new one,
you upgrade to wireless ax or whatever
and then you go reset up your old one.
So you just wipe it and set it up in AiMesh mode.
And it will just connect to your new one
and extend your wireless, it's pretty freaking sweet.
It's honestly, one of the most compelling features
of their wireless routers.
Okay, wireless name, winner,
security, never stopped winning 69.
(Andy giggle)
Huh!
There's a giveaway.
What are we giving away, these?
- [Jono] Yeah.
- This one? - Not that one.
- No? - But ASUS will send out.
- ASUS will send out give aways.
- Yeah. - Check the link below.
Yeah, we wanna run it in Wi-Fi 6 mode.
That is something to watch out for though.
If you have older devices
they may have difficulty connecting in Wi-Fi 6 mode.
But frankly, if you're the kind of person
who's spending like over $200 on a router
so you probably have like a reasonably modern phone,
you know, probably.
Apparently, this thing has a mobile game mode.
So you press a button
and it reduces mobile gaming latency.
One of the biggest challenges,
especially if you're not a networking wizkid
is when you get a router that has a really, really
complicated settings menu.
Unfortunately, ASUS's is actually surprisingly
well laid out, I love you ASUS.
Lots of just, you know, basic, useful features.
So right when you drop into it, you can see your network map
list out all your clients, easily rename them,
give them aliases, stuff like that,
which is pretty darn handy
if you like keeping your network organized.
They've got their AiProtection.
So this is powered by Trend Micro
to give you real-time network monitoring.
If you're a really responsible user
or you have protection on your individual machines
it's not necessarily something that you'll need
but heck it is there.
QoS is something that allows you to prioritize
certain applications or certain types of traffic.
Traffic analyzer gives you all kinds of fun, little stats.
You can see it by client or by app.
And of course the gaming menu
is not for like gaming on your router
it's for any game related features.
So port forwarding for example
is something that's relatively painless to do
on one of these puppies.
Of course, the only thing most people are going to do
is change their wireless settings.
So the only fields you really need to care about in here
or if you need to reconfigure your SSID name
and change your pre shared key.
You might have to tinker around with this setting
whether or not to enable 160 megahertz,
because like I said these wireless six features
and ultra, ultra wide channels can cause issues
with some legacy clients.
So at least you've got the ability to turn it off.
One of the things that I would strongly recommend is
if you are going to use ultra wide channels
go ahead and manually configure which one you're on,
preferably after using a tool to scan for nearby SSIDs
and see what channel they're operating on.
There's tons of tools that you can use to do that.
One of the ones that I like on Android,
but I haven't used it recently is called WiFi Analyzer.
So it just allows you to see,
hey, what all, what else is around here,
ladies and gentlemen,
so that you can manually configure your router
so it's less likely that you're gonna be
stepping on your neighbors or vice versa.
One other thing you might wanna tinker with
is going into the LAN setting
and changing the IP address of the router itself.
By default it's 192.168.50.1 for this particular one.
Personally, I prefer to keep
all of my networking infrastructure in my house
dot one dot single digit.
So I don't have to like guess too many things if I forget.
And I don't feel like pulling up the master list
that I keep, but you know, that's,
your mileage may vary there.
You can, of course access it through router.asus.com.
So that's pretty much all there is to say about it.
What is this?
It's a big upgrade if you're someone like Riley
who is still using the ISP provided modem
slash switch slash access point slash router,
those foreign one devices are generally speaking,
hot garbage, and he actually experienced this
when trying to game over GeForce.
Now, when he was working on his review of the Chromecast
with Android TV.
So if you were to put that thing in modem only mode
and just type into this puppy
and connect his wireless clients to this,
I guarantee he would have a better experience
and you probably will too.
Another great use case for something like this
is Nvidia or Steams in home streaming.
So if you've got a wired connected desktop device
for example, and then you wanna game remotely
using a laptop or a cell phone or something like that
this is pretty much the way to do it.
So you can check it out at the link
in the video description.
Thanks ASUS for sponsoring this video
and thanks to you for watching.