The broadband router Asus RT-AX 82 U transmits with fast WiFi and has steam under the hood, but also special gaming adjustments.

With the RT-AX 82 Asus is not only addressing gamers in terms of design: The router also has one for gaming provided LAN port also QoS functions, but more on that in a moment. On the hardware side, the device is well equipped: A tri-core processor from Broadcom (three ARM-A7 cores with 1.5 GHz each) takes care of the data transfer, supported by 512 MByte RAM. It transmits in both WLAN bands also with Broadcom chips according to Wi-Fi 6, on 2.4 GHz but only via two antennas (MIMO streams) and therefore delivers a maximum of 574 Mbit / s gross. That is definitely enough for smartphones and tablets. In the 5 GHz band, the router uses four streams, which increases the gross throughput with a very good wireless connection with an extra-wide channel (160 MHz) to a maximum of 4800 Mbit / s.

Wi-Fi-6-capable notebooks typically only have two antennas and therefore do not have 2400 Mbit / s gross, which in the test was slightly above 900 Mbit / s net resulted. For everyday use 80 MHz radio bandwidth was at least scarce 900 Mbit / s. Because this is less than 1 GBit / s, the lack of extra-fast ports (multigigabit Ethernet) is only a shortcoming for those who want to link particularly fast PCs and network storage (NAS); they use a separate switch. About 20 Meters through several walls, the throughput dropped as expected, but in the best case it was still very good 400 MBit / s inside. A Wi-Fi 5 router (Fritzbox 4800) came in at most to half ( 150 – 207 Mbit / s).

The processing power of the RT -AX 82 U was enough to forward data streams from today’s fastest Internet connections with 1 GBit / s without loss. We measured a little less with PPPoE, but the loss was due to our test computer; According to the status display, the router CPU was a long way from being up and might have delivered more. The device is also suitable as a reasonably fast NAS replacement: The NAS benchmark showed read rates of around 90 MByte / s; the letter went with 59 MByte / s (NTFS file system) or 55 MByte / s (ext4) a little slower.

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