RT-AC86u or WRT3200ACM

[Max Nguyen]

I bought a RT-AC86u for my home and am quite pleased with it vs the google wifi setup I had before.

I was talking wifi with a friend and he had a WRT3200ACM spare and said he would give it to me.

Would one be better than the other? I'm contemplating taking it and returning the Asus.

Not a gamers, but I like having good 5ghz range and speeds. I'm a bit of a gadget guy, so all my devices are up to date.

I'm just really thinking that if they are very close in performance, I may as well save the $200 and return the asus.

 

[avtella]

The 86U is better CPU and WiFi performance wise. The 86U is a 4 stream router and the WRTAC3200 despite having 4 antennas is a 3 stream router. The 86U would have made ch better VPN performance.

Okay now having said all that I would just take the free WRT3200 since WiFi performance is still great on it, I mean the difference won’t be night and day and unless you need VPN performance of like a 100Mbpw it will do just fine. Even for games it won’t really matter which one you have as games take very little bandwidth like in kilobytes per second at most and basic QoS is on both routers should be good enough for most users. So just save that $200 for something you actually need.

 

[Max Nguyen]

Well he told me I can just have it even if I were to sell it.

So if there was one of $100 difference. Still use the Asus?

 

[avtella]

Unless you need very high VPN performance as mentioned above just go for the cost savings.

 

[sfx2000]

Keep the Asus - and use the 3200ACM as an AP - Linksys doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the Asus - but it's first rate hardware, and the WRT's have very good performance for WiFi...

 

[Max Nguyen]

Keep the Asus - and use the 3200ACM as an AP - Linksys doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the Asus - but it's first rate hardware, and the WRT's have very good performance for WiFi...

What about the EA8300 Linksys?

Would I benefit from teh Tri band on teh linksys? I have a about 25 wrieless devices in my house. I'd say 20 of them are on 5ghz.

 

[avtella]

No you should be fine, I'm using a dual band myself with 20+ devices. I have a triband (R8500) as well that isn't being used, in daily usage a triband doesn't really help me. I suppose if you have multiple devices saturating the router with large amounts of data at any given time then maybe but unless you have a NAS or 500+ Mbps internet speeds I doubt it would really help for the average user. For streaming on multiple devices and gaming I don't think it will give you any real boost.

Just keep the free WRT3200ACM, no need to spend more for anything else.

 

[mokodi]

Keep the Asus - and use the 3200ACM as an AP - Linksys doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the Asus - but it's first rate hardware, and the WRT's have very good performance for WiFi...

I got the impression that the Marvell based WiFi routers weren’t very good. Lots of instability and empty promises to the open source community regarding drivers. Not quite as bad as Quantenna but still pretty bad. Their raw performance is great but WiFi was lacking

 

[sfx2000]

I got the impression that the Marvell based WiFi routers weren’t very good. Lots of instability and empty promises to the open source community regarding drivers. Not quite as bad as Quantenna but still pretty bad. Their raw performance is great but WiFi was lacking

The GPL/FOSS drivers for DDWRT/OpenWRT were a bit spooky, but the closed source Marvell drivers are pretty solid...

 

[sfx2000]

What about the EA8300 Linksys?

Would I benefit from teh Tri band on teh linksys? I have a about 25 wrieless devices in my house. I'd say 20 of them are on 5ghz.

Completely different beast - the WRT's are developed by one team, the others like the EA series, another - they share some code...