ASUS AC5300 and AC88U Router Review

Conclusion

When it comes to home networking most of us find our ISP provided routers to be sub-par, either providing us with inadequate WiFi range or performance or simply slowing down under the pressure of our many wired and wireless devices.

High end routers are exactly what they advertise, providing superior WiFi range and signal strength and being able to handle the loads provided by a highly connected home network, complete with a home server or large NAS that receives constant use of daily backup or media streaming.

What high end routers also provide you with is a large amount of control, giving you the ability to constantly monitor your internal or external traffic using the ASUS Router App and allows you to easily configure your gaming specific features or enable parental controls and data limits over your devices.

Both of these routers are designed for specific high usage use cases, meaning that these routers have been designed to withstand high loads and constant use.

The ASUS AC5300 is designed as an enthusiast grade  Wireless router, offering not one but 3 wireless connections, with a single 2G and two 5G signals, allowing up to a tri-band data rate of 5334Mbps, which is a connection speed that is simply insane. This router is for those that want the fastest WiFi speeds that they can get and this router delivers just that, with more antennas to than most would believe necessary. 

When we move to the AC88U we can clearly see that this router is focused on wired performance, offering 8 total Gigabit Ethernet connection, allowing you to connect up to 8 Ethernet devices simultaneously whether it be games consoles, smart TVs, PCs, media players of network attached storage solutions. This router is designed to be a strong core to your wired home network, but with it’s strong WiFi capabilities you will certainly not be displeased with your purchase. 

These routers are designed to handle the high pressures enthusiast grade users, whether you are a heavy media streamer or a heavy gamer. Both of these routers include game acceleration technology, making you router process all of you gaming packets first and can even make sure your data takes the most efficient path to the server through WTFast technology. If you want your network speed to be fast and your latency and ping to be low, an investment in a better router is a must.  

The choice between these routers is a simple one, do you use more WiFi or do you connect everything with Gigabit Ethernet? If you want the strongest Wireless the AC5300 is for you, but if you want more Ethernet connections the AC88U is for you. 

Out of the many advantages the these routers bring to the table one of the core advantages that places these routers on our radar is it’s support for link aggregation, allowing us to connect TTL’s home server via a parallel Ethernet connection, which allows us to access data on the server at a much faster rate and provides us with a bit of redundancy in the even that one of the Ethernet connections on the server fails. 

When we look at these routers we see something that is enthusiast grade, almost business class really, giving us the backbone needed to create an exceptionally strong home network that is nigh impossible to beat with other consumer grade tech. 

With the ASUS AC88U costing £299.99 and the ASUS AC5300 costing £399.95 is is easy to say that you pay a lot for these routers, but being honest if you are a a user who wants to use the features that these router provide it is an easy price to pay. 

If you are a person who will make use of Link aggregation, have a large amount of internal internet traffic and require the ability to connect to a large amount of wireless devices at range these routers are options that must be considered. 

For the large prices that these routers demand and the exceptionally high end feature set and functionality of these devices we simply cannot give these routers anything other than the OC3D Performance Award. The core of your internal home network needs to be strong and these are about the strongest consumer routers that you can get.  

 

You can join the discussion on the ASUS AC5300 and AC88U Wireless routers on the OC3D Forums.