PhantomRay
Occasional Visitor
I would bet that the AC5300 was simply doing a better job at selecting the right channel and pushing data over it. You may try to adjust the AX11000 manually to see if it makes a difference.
I forgot to mention that luckily, during my tests, the 5G-1 bands of AC5300 and AX11000 all landed on the same 80mhz channel. But still AC5300 performs much better than AX11000. So I would rule out channel differences being the problem.
BTW, seeing media bridge worked great for wireless communication between the two AX11000s and I set them up to use 160mhz channels and set them to communicate on a fixed channel for another round of testing.
I wired my gaming PC to the media bridge AX11000 on the third floor study, place the main router on the second floor living room. The media bridge mode AX11000 being a floor and several walls away, signal strength being only around -70dB, it was capable of delivering over 470mbps from media bridge to my PC via wire consistently! which is the maximum I can pull directly from the modem (or AC5300 was capable doing over wireless).
To this point, now I truly believe there must be some regression on AC.
A $450 media bridge sounds like a very expensive solution, probably i will return one of the AX11000 and rebuy the AC5300 again to run a AX11000-AC5300 mix.