ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 router +AIMesh review - Introduction

Asus ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 (with AIMesh)
Will 800 bucks worth of routers finally get you stable WIFI?

We review the ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 Dual and Triple Band Wi-Fi Router from ASUS, these AIMesh ready quad-core processor monsters of a router have been introduced last year and recently got some added functionality. It offers proper WIFI ranges and performance. Recently these routers have been granted new AIMesh compatibility, meaning you can combine multiple of these puppies (or other compatible devices) to start your own in-house mesh. WIFI everywhere! It's very fast, very sexy and offers performance and ranges on both LAN and WIFI as you may expect from a ROG product.

Routers these days. You can purchase a dime a dozen and most of them end up all being the same, as such the more predominant manufacturers continuously seek to add new features to their product in order to differentiate themselves in the market. And that's difficult as there isn't a lot of extras you can do with a router really, you are tied to industry Ethernet and WIFI standards, you can make sure the throughput of the devices is good enough for modern age high-bandwidth file throughput and you can make the firmware as sexy as possible with a nice GUI and extensive feature set. The Asus ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 Wi-Fi Router is based on the design of the popular ASUS router series now with nostalgic Republic Of Gamers looks. This model though, has a Broadcom BCM4908 quad-core 1.8 GHz processor, 1024 MB DDR3 DRAM, eight removable antennas and even comes USB 2.0/3.0 connectivity ports for a bit of UPnP NAS functionality. Following the latest standards, the AC5300 is compatible with 802.11a, 802.11ac, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n and will manage up to a combined 2,167 Mbps on two 5 GHz bands and one 2.4 GHz band. We'll advance on that, even triple band is possible combining the three together. A nice feature of the router is that it offers multiple guest networks as well, so your friends and family can use their iOS or Android smartphone or tablet on your network completely isolated and secured from your LAN. Network Map is a visual topology map that shows all the devices that are connected to the network. Users can simple manage each device by clicking on its icon and change parental control settings, select wireless bands, filter by device type, or even remove devices from the network, plus more. The router can be used a gigabit switch as well, you'll spot 8 Gigabit ports, and if you need some redundancy and have two internet service providers (who doesn't right ;) you can use one Gigabit jack and set up some load-balancing or a failover.

This router, however, is amongst the most expensive ones we have ever tested, tagged with a price of 399 EURO / $449 will it be worth it? Well, again, mesh .. we'll even advance on that, and use two of these today. One at a ground floor level, the other at a second-floor level. Have a peek at the product and then let's dive into the review.