[Asus RT-AX88U] Experiences & Discussion

[WiFiSeeder]

You first downgraded to Asus stock firmware then you did a full reset to factory defaults, correct?

Yes. Actually, I first did a factory reset with Merlin's firmware with no results. I've then downgraded to Asus stock firmware and factory reset.

Router is gone now. Returned it to the seller. My old and trusted DSL-AC68U is in place again. It's curious how I get around 20% better performance at close range than with the AX-88U. Unfortunately, a couple of rooms away from the router and I'm back to sub 100 Mbps speeds (the AX-88U could do more than twice of that).

Now I kinda don't know what to do.
I couldn't get my Killer 1550 + AX-88U combo @ 160 Mhz channels to be stable even at close range (so no 1.2 GBps+ for me at close range, at least not for more than a few minutes).
The AX-88U had great range though...

My choices now are basically:

1) To try my luck with a new AX-88U (and hope that my 5ghz network do not die in 10 days)
2) cut costs and go for an AC-86U that also has great range and good short distance speeds. In the future I may buy a second one and put it in media bridge mode (or maybe an 7800. Don't know if it's bridge mode plays well with an ASUS as the main router).
3) I could stop chasing the 1 Gbps over WiFi dream all together and buy a pack with 2 AC1900's. As far as I understand their performance should be very similar to my AC68U at close range (May I say that it is the exact same hardware with a different layout?). I may even setup the second router in media bridge mode.

Another AX-88U is probably the most exciting option. However, since I've just experimented a hardware failure myself I don't know if it's worth it.
The AC-86U is probably the best cost/benefit and down-to-earth choice. Unfortunately my DSL-AC68U can't do Media Bridge Mode or it would be a no brainer.
The two AC1900's would also be an interesting choice. At this stage I would probably trade-off 160 MHz channels for a stable media bridge. Are there any benchmarks of the AC1900 in media bridge mode? I wonder what kind of speeds I should expect around 15 meters / two walls away from the main Router? Hopefully I can get at least 400 Mbps to clients wired to the bridge. That way I could get "acceptable" speeds for all clients, even if it's far from maxing out my 1 Gbps connection.

 

[JemTheWire]

I have to say that I am rather disappointed with the WiFi performance of both the 2.4 and 5GHz bands of this router. So much so, I have brought back into service my trusty AC-88U as an access point and completely disabled all WiFi on the AX-88U.

However, that being said, this setup (router & access point), is working very well for me so it's certainly not a deal breaker. Apart from the WiFi, it is a beast of a router and runs my OpenVPN server with ease.

 

[WiFiSeeder]

I have to say that I am rather disappointed with the WiFi performance of both the 2.4 and 5GHz bands of this router. So much so, I have brought back into service my trusty AC-88U as an access point and completely disabled all WiFi on the AX-88U.

However, that being said, this setup (router & access point), is working very well for me so it's certainly not a deal breaker. Apart from the WiFi, it is a beast of a router and runs my OpenVPN server with ease.

I really wonder why the AX-88U is performing worse than last gen ASUS routers for AC Clients.

I know that it's a new chipset and the manufacturer's priority is AX... However, I imagine that ASUS is aware that lots of people are migrating from routers like
AC88U, AC5300, AC-86U or even AC68U (like me).

Hopefully this will be fixed in the future. Otherwise that £300 could probably be better spent in a Linux box with two NICs acting as a router and OpenVPN client (it is not as hard to setup as it sounds).

 

[frichardson]

I'm not sure if I can add any rigorous measurements to the discussion - let me know if there is a better way of measuring this. My ISP is RCN and I have there "one gig" service which does give me over 900mbps if I'm attached directly to the modem (upload is between 20-30mbps...).

I'm in a condo complex with a fair amount of competition. I at least managed to get on a non-DFS channel that is not shared by my neighbors.

The unit has three floors partitioned from left to right. Starting in the same room as the router, using speedtest.net, my Pixel 2 gets about 580mbps, while my laptop gets over 640mpbs (Intel AC 8260 adapter). The worst case scenario for me is the basement (2 floors down and one room over) where the pixel gets around 100mpbs. The dining room, office and bedroom (basically one room over or one floor up) are over 400mbps. This is all of course with the 5G band.

I am pretty happy with this if it holds up, but I don't really have much to compare it to (except for my old router which set a pretty low bar).

 

[WiFiSeeder]

@frichardson, it looks like yours is a keeper. I couldn't get 2/3 of the speeds that you have just disclosed (without 160hz channels / less than 2 meters away).
Those are very good results.

 

[PhantomRay]

I'm not sure if I can add any rigorous measurements to the discussion - let me know if there is a better way of measuring this. My ISP is RCN and I have there "one gig" service which does give me over 900mbps if I'm attached directly to the modem (upload is between 20-30mbps...).

I'm in a condo complex with a fair amount of competition. I at least managed to get on a non-DFS channel that is not shared by my neighbors.

The unit has three floors partitioned from left to right. Starting in the same room as the router, using speedtest.net, my Pixel 2 gets about 580mbps, while my laptop gets over 640mpbs (Intel AC 8260 adapter). The worst case scenario for me is the basement (2 floors down and one room over) where the pixel gets around 100mpbs. The dining room, office and bedroom (basically one room over or one floor up) are over 400mbps. This is all of course with the 5G band.

I am pretty happy with this if it holds up, but I don't really have much to compare it to (except for my old router which set a pretty low bar).

Those results are good, but I think top end AC could do better. GT-AC5300 could pull over 900 out of the gigabit service.

@frichardson, it looks like yours is a keeper. I couldn't get 2/3 of the speeds that you have just disclosed (without 160hz channels / less than 2 meters away).
Those are very good results.

In the end, I am returning my AX routers. Going to get AC routers for now. I am just so tired of monitoring and fixing my router everyday.

To your previous post about setting up Router + AP. I did try that and I have full freedom of controlling two routers independently. However, there is big coverage overlap in my home, and my devices are very sticky to the one they first connect. It is very painful to reconfigure wifi for those devices one by one. Things get worse when later one router behaves badly and I had to reboot it, that means I need to repeat the process again. And you know, with the flaky new chipset or firmware (needs to be determined), I had to reboot quite often...

But with AiMesh, the routers in the mesh know which device has weaker signal strength with one node and would proactively disconnect the device and push it to a stronger one. I observe that behavior in the syslog. There is definitely something proprietary working here. I love responsive roaming at home since we have phones, laptops, ipads moving around.

There is problem with dual AX11000 mesh setup too. They work great when I first set them up, however, maybe after a day or so, they start performing really slow (sub 200 in close range), and reboot seems like could improve the speed every time. If I reboot the router via the GUI, it only reboots the main one, I had to ssh into the node to run a /sbin/reboot to reboot the node. Unfortunately, every time I did such reboot operations, the main router would have trouble to maintain a stable association with the node and after a while the main router would crash and I had to manually power cycle the main router....

I was doing that for two days.... and I finally make up my mind to give up AX routers. I plugged in GT-AC5300, everything worked great out of the box, no any configuration needed, I am getting the maxed out speed!

What do I loose by switching from AX11000 to GT-AC5300?

- CPU? Same!
- RAM and flash? Same!
- USB connection? Same!
- Max PHY speed? Halved with GT-AC5300, because GT-AC5300 only supports 80 mhz channels whereas AX11000 supports 160 mhz channel. They all have 1024QAM modulation. But in reality, if you are really aiming for the top speed that AX11000 can deliver, you have to have a client with 160 mhz channel support and has 1024QAM modulation. I don't expect that to appear in market at a affordable price any time soon. And to really enjoy that kind of internet speed, you are going to pay a fat bill to ISP. (Right now comcast charge you $300 a month for gig pro 2gig service). And do I need that speed? Of course not....
- The 2.5 gig LAN port? I need to pay a fortune to ISP to really enjoy it and not needed for my daily use.
- DFS channels? Well, it sounds nice that you can have your own channels but comparing to stable and fast wifi that AC5300 is offering in non-DFS channels, I am ok to "play" with my neighbors

Instead of loosing anything significant, I am getting much more stable and faster internet, no regular reboot needed. I can set them up once and forget about them.

Maybe in two years, a lot of my devices become AX, and the firmware become more usable, I would upgrade then.

 

[PhantomRay]

Oh I forgot to mention, while I was doing comparison between AC5300 and AX11000, I did notice that AC is giving my PC better signal strength than AX. Quite the opposite to other online review says. Not sure about how valid those reviews are now.

 

[L&LD]

Oh I forgot to mention, while I was doing comparison between AC5300 and AX11000, I did notice that AC is giving my PC better signal strength than AX. Quite the opposite to other online review says. Not sure about how valid those reviews are now.

Which reviews?

 

[PhantomRay]

Which reviews?

There are only a few reviews on the internet about these new routers that comes with some test data and not just repeating the information available on the official product page.

The ones I had been able to found and got me into buying AX router are these two:
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/asus-rog-rapture-gt-ax11000-review
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/asus-rt-ax88u-review

However, after I bought the products and tried them, I am not seeing what the author was claiming in his review. I even questioned about his review but his replies are just too vague.

As you can see, his two reviews are basically following the same structure and wording are very similar, just pictures and model numbers replaced, seems like.

 

[frichardson]

@PhantomRay - yes I was actually expecting to get closer to 1Gbps over AC with the RT-AX88U.

I admit that the first router that drew my attention was also the GT-AC5300. Having three bands would be really nice. The price is also very close to the RT-AX88U.

So is the inherent trade-off with the RT-AX88U that you get "future-proof"'d at the expense of AC performance? =\

 

[L&LD]

Thank you for the links.

When someone has a good format for testing and reporting, it is a good thing they follow it. Makes comparisons much easier.

I don't see an issue with what was reported on those links? Seems fairly objective and scientific and real world at the same time.

We don't always get to experience what others do. Your network environment is obviously much different than his.

 

[PhantomRay]

@PhantomRay - yes I was actually expecting to get closer to 1Gbps over AC with the RT-AX88U.

I admit that the first router that drew my attention was also the GT-AC5300. Having three bands would be really nice. The price is also very close to the RT-AX88U.

So is the inherent trade-off with the RT-AX88U that you get "future-proof"'d at the expense of AC performance? =\

I tried very hard to convince myself to keep the AX routers for "future-proof", I was convinced, but not for long. As soon I started having all kinds of issues, especially when I switch back to GT-AC5300, I realized "future-proof" is a fantasy I was chasing after.

Let's say, I use my GT-AC5300 for another year or two, then sell it off online, the differences are probably close or even the same, if I am lucky, as the price decrease of the AX router then. The most I would lost in that case would be around 100 bucks. But I am ok with that because for the time I have my AC router, all my AC clients performs well and I don't have to fiddle with the router everyday or even think too much about it.

And having a tri-band means you can connect more devices without performance degradation.

 

[frichardson]

@PhantomRay - to be clear - I don't believe at all in "future proof" -which I guess makes me think I look pretty silly buying the RT-AX88U router. Honestly I thought I was getting a much better router that happened to support the up coming AX protocol, not so-so performing router that mainly features AX support.

I do think the extra compute on the router is appealing for things like running VPN etc. which makes the GT-AC5300 a nice alternative.

Anyone else have any thoughts on the GT-AC5300 vs the RT-AX88U?

EDIT: Actually, looking at the review you link above, the author does a good job of comparing the RT-AX88U to the GT-AC5300. My numbers are pretty close to his (some slightly better). The drop off in signal strength and the lack of a third channel are the biggest down-sides to the RT-AX88U.

EDIT2: Wait, no RMerlin firmware and scripting tools on the GT? Well, that kind of sets the balance back to the RT for me...

 

[L&LD]

@PhantomRay - to be clear - I don't believe at all in "future proof" -which I guess makes me think I look pretty silly buying the RT-AX88U router. Honestly I thought I was getting a much better router that happened to support the up coming AX protocol, not so-so performing router that mainly features AX support.

I do think the extra compute on the router is appealing for things like running VPN etc. which makes the GT-AC5300 a nice alternative.

Anyone else have any thoughts on the GT-AC5300 vs the RT-AX88U?

EDIT: Actually, looking at the review you link above, the author does a good job of comparing the RT-AX88U to the GT-AC5300. My numbers are pretty close to his (some slightly better). The drop off in signal strength and the lack of a third channel are the biggest down-sides to the RT-AX88U.

EDIT2: Wait, no RMerlin firmware and scripting tools on the GT? Well, that kind of sets the balance back to the RT for me...

I think that is what many of us do here...

New Asus router introduced! Yah!!!

No RMerlin support? Noo!!!

Next.

 

[PhantomRay]

EDIT: Actually, looking at the review you link above, the author does a good job of comparing the RT-AX88U to the GT-AC5300. My numbers are pretty close to his (some slightly better). The drop off in signal strength and the lack of a third channel are the biggest down-sides to the RT-AX88U.
.

The AX performance numbers may look close to what you are getting, however, the GT-AC5300's test results are way under what I am seeing with my GT-AC5300 and in my side to side comparison tests. My GT-AC5300 has stronger signal and much faster speed. And the speed result showing in that tests does not conform with the posts or discussions in this forum. I highly suspect the GT-AC5300's numbers were purposely "tuned" down to showcase how AX is much better.

E.g.

No way GT-AC5300 is only doing 373.78 out out his gigabit internet service. Mine could do 477 out of 400 package, which is on par with wired internet speed. And I can get over 400 in the room couple walls away.

Some post discussed about GT-AC5300 speed:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/gt-ac5300-and-comcast-gigabit-internet.47745/#post-417477
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/gt-ac5300-and-comcast-gigabit-internet.47745/#post-417518

Also this:

it impossible that GT-AC5300 is only doing 334.40 in close range.

All his AC5300 results does not conform with Tim's benchmark:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wir...-band-gaming-router-reviewed?showall=&start=2

I know Tim's benchmark may not be the standard of how things should be, but reading through the GT-AC5300 threads, a lot of ppl are posting similar results.

 

[L&LD]

The AX performance numbers may look close to what you are getting, however, the GT-AC5300's test results are way under what I am seeing with my GT-AC5300 and in my side to side comparison tests. My GT-AC5300 has stronger signal and much faster speed. And the speed result showing in that tests does not conform with the posts or discussions in this forum. I highly suspect the GT-AC5300's numbers were purposely "tuned" down to showcase how AX is much better.

E.g.

No way GT-AC5300 is only doing 373.78 out out his gigabit internet service. Mine could do 477 out of 400 package, which is on par with wired internet speed. And I can get over 400 in the room couple walls away.

Some post discussed about GT-AC5300 speed:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/gt-ac5300-and-comcast-gigabit-internet.47745/#post-417477
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/gt-ac5300-and-comcast-gigabit-internet.47745/#post-417518

Also this:

it impossible that GT-AC5300 is only doing 334.40 in close range.

All his AC5300 results does not conform with Tim's benchmark:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wir...-band-gaming-router-reviewed?showall=&start=2

Sorry, but there is no way you can compare your network and WiFi environment and ISP with the reviewers.

Even if you lived right next door to each other.

 

[PhantomRay]

Sorry, but there is no way you can compare your network and WiFi environment and ISP with the reviewers.

Even if you lived right next door to each other.

I am aware of that, that is why I edited:
I know Tim's benchmark may not be the standard of how things should be, but reading through the GT-AC5300 threads, a lot of ppl are posting similar results.

 

[L&LD]

I am aware of that, that is why I edited:
I know Tim's benchmark may not be the standard of how things should be, but reading through the GT-AC5300 threads, a lot of ppl are posting similar results.

Doesn't make them any more right or wrong than you though.

A (WiFi) network is unto itself. I'm sure that that reviewer can reproduce his published results in his environment. Just like everyone else can reproduce theirs in their own.

 

[PhantomRay]

Doesn't make them any more right or wrong than you though.

A (WiFi) network is unto itself. I'm sure that that reviewer can reproduce his published results in his environment. Just like everyone else can reproduce theirs in their own.

You are a funny guy

 

[RMerlin]

Oh I forgot to mention, while I was doing comparison between AC5300 and AX11000, I did notice that AC is giving my PC better signal strength than AX. Quite the opposite to other online review says. Not sure about how valid those reviews are now.

My RT-AX88U does seem to have a slightly better range than my RT-AC88U, the signal on my Zenpad is a bit stronger while at the other end of my appartment.