RT-AC86u Officially announced

[Kewjoe]

certainly a better router in both coverage and throughput , but at a pretty big jump in price

For my needs. $60 for better, newer specs and the latest generation versus older generation (although stability is a concern) is worth it. I was having trouble justifying the jump to the RT-AC3100. The AC86u strikes the right balance. I'm just a little gun shy being an early adopter.

 

[RMerlin]

did you notice cpu and mem usage while testing , seemed quite high to me

I didn't notice, but considering the previous platform would peg the core at 100% (it was CPU-bound), I'm not that worried by it.

Memory usage would go quite high due to Linux aggressively caching the filesystem - again, same phenomenon could be observed with all past generations. Buffers will get flushed once memory is required elsewhere.

What I did notice however is Broadcom's BPM reserves 15% of available memory for its use. That's why there's only 440 MB of available memory out of 512 MB. This pooled memory is apparently used by BCM processes/drivers. I don't know any further detail, just figuring out what BPM stood for took me some digging...

 

[pete y testing]

lucky most have worked out that usb is really not worth it apart from maybe printers , with NAS so cheap and the fact it doesnt tax ether cpu or ram on the router

btw havnt been testing the 86u for long but it seemed stable and without many issues at all , pretty much ready to go out of the box

 

[RMerlin]

btw havnt been testing the 86u for long but it seemed stable and without many issues at all , pretty much ready to go out of the box

There are a few low-level issues. Some of them are fixed in the latest 382_16xxx firmware (Trend Micro process would randomly crash, and router would then fail numerous calls to fork(), leaving the router half-crashed). Others still exist in 382_16xxx (userspace ebtables tool fails to run, caused by Aus not properly building the ld.so.cache content).

It's getting there, but... not quite yet. On my end I'm waiting for Asus to upload a non-corrupted GPL drop to take care of the Trend Micro stuff, and I got a fix in place for the ld.so.cache issue (I reported it upstream a few days ago, so I expect Asus to get that one sorted out on the stock firmware by next release).

 

[Kewjoe]

Just picked myself up a AC86u (returned the AC1900p i picked up a week before). Going to put it through its paces before it takes over for my dependable AC66u. @RMerlin Let me know if you need any help testing at any point