ASUS RT-N66U Dark Knight Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router Reviewed

[psg190]

Count me in! U have to manually set ports, for whs11 you need 80,443 and 4125 all tcp. Haven't had to set any ports for ps3, what ports u need open on it?
Please let asus know about it.

Thanks for the heads up. I submitted a bug report to ASUS.

 

[mickeykool]

Do you have 40Mhz channel BW set in N66U?
Your wifi adapters can do 300Mb?
Have you changed any wifi settings?
Have you tried other spots in hour house? Is it constantly <300Mb?

Opened utilities / network utilities and I'm showing link speed @ 144Mbs. Should this be showing 300 instead and if so how am i supposed to get this on my macair.

also yes did change bw channel to 40.

 

[G37x]

Opened utilities / network utilities and I'm showing link speed @ 144Mbs. Should this be showing 300 instead and if so how am i supposed to get this on my macair.

also yes did change bw channel to 40.

Ok I did check the same thing. I guess that thing is stupid, it always shows 144 (same for me), regardless where you are in coverage, you can ignore that. Hopefully these macairs have 300M chip capable, not that stupid 1 stream 150M (atheros etc).

 

[tonytoronto]

Ok I did check the same thing. I guess that thing is stupid, it always shows 144 (same for me), regardless where you are in coverage, you can ignore that. Hopefully these macairs have 300M chip capable, not that stupid 1 stream 150M (atheros etc).

i'm sure you guys know, most cards need wpa2/AES encryption in order to enable bonding the channels.
Have you guys tried to disable 5ghz radio and see if channels bond than?

 

[G37x]

i'm sure you guys know, most cards need wpa2/AES encryption in order to enable bonding the channels.
Have you guys tried to disable 5ghz radio and see if channels bond than?

Nah, that stupid thing still shows 144Mb, no difference...

 

[delair2]

Yes/No?

For all you early RT-N66U adopters...my N66U is due to arrive Monday March 5th ( via Amazon.com) . Would you do it again? I am currently running the Asus 56U and the e4200 V2 ( AP Mode) for whole home coverage ( 2 levels).

 

[12darline]

Yes, I would, without question...

 

[jabloomf1230]

For all you early RT-N66U adopters...my N66U is due to arrive Monday March 5th ( via Amazon.com) . Would you do it again? I am currently running the Asus 56U and the e4200 V2 ( AP Mode) for whole home coverage ( 2 levels).

Probably, even though I'm still waiting for ASUS to send me back a router, after the RT-N66U failed completely (no lights, no nothing) @ 34 days. My experience seems in line with other posts about the speed of the ASUS RMA process.

But while I had it, it was one impressive beast, even with the glitchy early versions of the stock firmware.

 

[RogerSC]

Still waiting for Asus firmware with working IPv6 support, and it would be nice if the "client list" was better. I'm using it with an Asus rt-n56u as AP.

Yes, I'd do it again, the rt-n66u is a really nice piece of hardware. I like both of my Asus routers in a time when other router manufacturers seem to be struggling (based on reviews, forum postings, and my personal experience).

 

[TonyH]

For all you early RT-N66U adopters...my N66U is due to arrive Monday March 5th ( via Amazon.com) . Would you do it again? I am currently running the Asus 56U and the e4200 V2 ( AP Mode) for whole home coverage ( 2 levels).

Hi,
Your house must be awful BIG! My RT-N66U covers 3 levels of PC, Laptop, Mac, games, etc. I can use my laptop outside in the backyard or in the garage too.
One of this days, I gota open the box and look, see if there is any thing like serial console port or Jtag header.

 

[darksamus]

Hi,
Your house must be awful BIG! My RT-N66U covers 3 levels of PC, Laptop, Mac, games, etc. I can use my laptop outside in the backyard or in the garage too.
One of this days, I gota open the box and look, see if there is any thing like serial console port or Jtag header.

It has a jtag and microSD slot shows up as a hard drive as if you plug a USB on the back of the router.

 

[njweb]

For all you early RT-N66U adopters...my N66U is due to arrive Monday March 5th ( via Amazon.com) . Would you do it again? I am currently running the Asus 56U and the e4200 V2 ( AP Mode) for whole home coverage ( 2 levels).

Like the others who responded so far:
Without hesitation.

The build quality is great and wifi performance is
class-leading as Tim's testing shows.
USB performance could definitely be better, at least compared to the E4200 v2, but from a routing perspective the RT-N66U is great - rock solid, easy to configure, simple firewall settings and great wifi performance.
Add to that the ability to tune it to your needs with the Wifi section's 'Professional' tab in the stock firmware and IMHO you have a winner.

Obviously it did have issues when it came out which affected a certain population of users (i.e. if you needed to use port forwarding or DLNA).
However, at least Asus has already released five firmware updates for it in the relatively short time it has been out which shows a willingness to address issues promptly.
IPv6 seems to not be working yet. For most that is a non issue for the time being. Hopefully it will be the next thing they fix though, so that we're ready when the time does come in several years (depending on when your ISP cuts over fully). It may end up being like DTV was in terms of adoption...

Linksys took 100 days to fix their E4200 (v1) media server issue. Luckily I did not need that feature at the time or I would have been as frustrated as the other owners in the huge thread about it).
Belkin to my knowledge did not officially fix their 2 hour disconnect issue on the N1 Vision (which there was luckily a workaround for. This was supplied by some savvy user (and not Belkin) who found the dev testing URL for the admin GUI that allowed processes to be killed using a PID and a 'kill' command). Non techies would hate the N1 Vision since they would not know about the workaround...

 

[NightOwl326]

wifi performance is
class-leading as Tim's testing shows.

Class Leading? There really is no "classes" in home wireless routers, just different feature sets, nor does Tim ever state "class leading".

Dig a little deeper in Tim's testing and you will see that the Amped R1000G just kicked the rt-n66u A** in areas such as Total Simultaneous Throughput, ranked #2 and rt-n66u #7. The Amped also tromped the Asus big time in 2.4Ghz Downlink throughput and 2.4Ghz Uplink throughput by wide margins (the top 2 areas in home wireless performance). Add also that the R1000G with 600mW will be no slouch in range and cheaper by $45.00 than the ASUS. In the bang for a buck and pure raw speed class, the Amped R1000G wins hand down.

An accurate quote of what Tim said in his rt-n66u review is: "As good as the RT-66U is, our wireless performance results once again show that no router is good in every mode that we test".

Looks like the R1000G may be moving to the head of the class.

 

[NightOwl326]

For all you early RT-N66U adopters...my N66U is due to arrive Monday March 5th ( via Amazon.com) . Would you do it again? I am currently running the Asus 56U and the e4200 V2 ( AP Mode) for whole home coverage ( 2 levels).

Based on your current combo, I don't really see what you would gain in the purchase of an rt-n66u, other than a new toy to play with? Seems like speed, features and coverage have been taken care of. What is the logic in purchasing the new Asus?

 

[TC777]

Class Leading? There really is no "classes" in home wireless routers, just different feature sets, nor does Tim ever state "class leading".

Dig a little deeper in Tim's testing and you will see that the Amped R1000G just kicked the rt-n66u A** in areas such as Total Simultaneous Throughput, ranked #2 and rt-n66u #7. The Amped also tromped the Asus big time in 2.4Ghz Downlink throughput and 2.4Ghz Uplink throughput by wide margins (the top 2 areas in home wireless performance). Add also that the R1000G with 600mW will be no slouch in range and cheaper by $45.00 than the ASUS. In the bang for a buck and pure raw speed class, the Amped R1000G wins hand down.

An accurate quote of what Tim said in his rt-n66u review is: "As good as the RT-66U is, our wireless performance results once again show that no router is good in every mode that we test".

Looks like the R1000G may be moving to the head of the class.

The Asus routers ARE the top or among the top routers out there... that is fact.

The R1000G generic router, is amped, and its hardly fair to be comparing that to routers using much lower mw. Lower the mw, and get a fair comparison. Also if you look at the location benchmarks, it isn't much or any faster than the Asus, at the farther away locations. In fact it doesn't even have any data at the hardest location, but the Asus does.

The R1000G doesn't even support 5G, and its a generic brand that most likely won't get updated often. Of the eight reviews on Amazon, two of them state that it doesn't even get a signal at the other end of their house.

 

[TC777]

Based on your current combo, I don't really see what you would gain in the purchase of an rt-n66u, other than a new toy to play with? Seems like speed, features and coverage have been taken care of. What is the logic in purchasing the new Asus?

I don't know about the person who you replied to, but the RT-N66U does have features the RT-N56U doesn't.

The biggest being that it supports open source firmware. Plus other firmware features, such as multiple guest SSID and other features. It has better performance at longer range on both 2.4 and 5ghz(from the stats posted here anyways).

I also find that it handles QOS better than the RT-N56U does. Or at least for me it does after I set the upload speed limit. I never could get it to work right on the N56U.

 

[hggomes]

I don't know about the person who you replied to, but the RT-N66U does have features the RT-N56U doesn't.

The biggest being that it supports open source firmware.

RT-N56U supports Open Source FW => http://code.google.com/p/rt-n56u/

 

[Lucinda]

For all you early RT-N66U adopters...my N66U is due to arrive Monday March 5th ( via Amazon.com) . Would you do it again? I am currently running the Asus 56U and the e4200 V2 ( AP Mode) for whole home coverage ( 2 levels).

Hello,

I purchased the RT-N66U over a month ago. I was pretty disappointed with it because of all the bugs. My old router worked much better! Sure it has great coverage but if you read some of the post in this thread it still needs a lot of work.

Would I do it again? If I did I would wait a few months to see if the bugs are fixed. I don't appreciate Asus using customers as beta testers.

I returned it and purchased the E4200 v2 and couldn't be happier. It is very fast and it performs much better than the RTN66U in my experience. No problems with range, QOS, file transfers.

Some said it's a bad router cause it doesn't support third party firmware. I do not care about those. I just want a router that will work well out of the box without tinkering with other stuff to make it work.

 

[mrcom]

I don't know about the person who you replied to, but the RT-N66U does have features the RT-N56U doesn't.

The biggest being that it supports open source firmware. Plus other firmware features, such as multiple guest SSID and other features. It has better performance at longer range on both 2.4 and 5ghz(from the stats posted here anyways).

I also find that it handles QOS better than the RT-N56U does. Or at least for me it does after I set the upload speed limit. I never could get it to work right on the N56U.

The RT-N56U doesn't support 450+450 mbit wifi i think its only 300+450 mbit.

 

[RogerSC]

The rt-n56u also has no guest network, and doesn't seem to have IPv6 support in its future (unless Padavan's firmware guys manage to wedge it in).