Netgear Nighthawk X10 R9000 AD7200

Just got this router, it has the best range amongst all the routers I've tested in the past few months like the Linksys EA9500, ASUS AC5300, and ASUS AC88U. I'm getting super fast speeds. Mind you, my connection from my ISP is a Fiber Optic connection with 100MBPS down/20MBPS up

This router supports the new AD7200 (60GHz) rated at 7 .2Gbps

It costs an arm and a leg though. I bought mine here in Dubai for USD $680

Not sure when we will see WLAN Cards that will support the AD standard

But benchmarks and whitepaper specs aside. what I noticed so far is my internet is way snappier. like webpages load instantly with 0 lag whereas with the ASUS RT-AC88U there was a slight lag before the page started to load.

Spoiler: Specs

• WIFI SPEED 7.2 Gbps
• TECHNOLOGY 802.11ac + 802.11ad
• NUMBER OF PORTS Seven (7) 10/100/1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet ports
  Two (2) USB 3.0 ports

• PROCESSOR SPEEDS 1.7GHz Quad Core
• NUMBER OF DEVICES 20+ Devices
• KEY FEATURES Plex Media Server
  Amazon Drive Cloud Backup
  High-Performace Active Antennas

See the full review here:

 

I connected a USB Hard drive that is full of movies I previously bought and launched the Plex Server. Now with the app installed on my phone, I can access any movie, song, picture, etc. from the app even if I wasn't at home. It's like my own media server available 24/7

It grabs all the info of the movies and organizes them nicely:

 

@Papusan

this router has a Quad Core 1.7GHz CPU. Can I overclock it?

@Falkentyne Immediately runs to inspect my router's voltage and power draw >>>

 

With Prema FW you might OC it.

Did you buy it locally?
You have 4 routers in your home? Do you live in a 3-4 storey home?
maybe your new PC will have a Intel/Killer card that actually support ad.
You've a Massive movie library.

 

Most likely fully locked down BGA

 

Nighthawk X10 R9000 Firmware v1.0.3.6

Just tried the Smart Connect feature and it auto connected my laptop which has a Killer AC1535 WLAN card to the 5GHz Network connected @ 866 MBPS. That's a very nice surprise as I've had a bad experience with every ASUS router in the past including the AC5300 and AC88U where with Smart Connect, they would always connect my to the 2.4 GHz network limiting my internet speed since I sit about 10 feet away from the router and there are like 2 walls between me and the router. So glad that I can finally turn on Smart Connect on this router and still be able to be connected to the 5GHz network automatically. Maybe because it has better range than the ASUS routers or because Netgear's Smart Connect implementation is better.

 

Is that speed limit electronically adjusted by your ISP?
On 100Mbps and 20Mbps, you're getting 22Mbps. ISP servers are acting weirdly.

 

yeah it is electronically capped that's why it's trying to go over 20mbps and stretching the band but the ISP cap is kicking in

 

@Phoenix
The Netgear X10 is very good router indeed, I've had one for the last year or so. However there appears to be an even better router out there for wifi range and coverage: the Linksys EA9500V 2 (not to be confused with the inferior first gen EA9500 V1). The V2 has a 1.8ghz quadcore CPU along with 1GB ram, so very similar hardware specs to the X10. However it has 3 wifi bands and I'm also finding the wifi coverage on it even better than the X10. On the downside its doesn't have a plex server built-in and is also extremely difficult to get hold of. Though there are a few sellers on ebay.com selling it (they will ship worldwide). Hope this helps!

 

Hey Matey,

Thank j00 for your suggestion; however, I've had the Linksys EA9500 V1 last year and although the range was good, the firmware was really limited, there is like nothing you can do in the settings, you can't even add sites to be blocked in the firewall rules It's like a plug and play router for people who don't need anything but a wireless and/or wired connection.

Also, while I've had it, Linksys never released any firmware for it. Upon researching this, it has come to my attention that Linksys very rarely offers firmware upgrades to enhance security and/or stability or add features.

I sold it for 50% of its price and took a big hit using it for less than 6 months and it is no fun when you buy a router like I did, only to discover 2 weeks that now there is a v2 and your high end flagship router that you paid an arm and a leg for now is the unwanted ugly duck since it's V1.

Linksys........never again....

 

Yeah I'll be the first to agree Linksys firmware is quite basic and nowhere near as feature rich as say Asus' offerings. However compared to say Asus' flagship router - the GT-AC5300 this has had loads of fw updates just to make it stable - the EA9500v2 is pretty solid. I'm hoping DD-WRT is available for it one day to run OpenVPN as that would allow me to make full use of that horsepower under the hood of the EA9500v2, eg running OpenVPN.

 

@psychopomp1 I don't want to hijack the thread about the Netgear, but a couple of notes here - one is that neither of those routers have any horsepower to brag about, as far as OpenVPN is concerned. OpenVPN or rather openssl is written in such a way that it only works on one core - for compatibility reasons - and as such your Linksys has 1.8 GHz and Netgear has 1.7 GHz on a single core. That's all the horsepower you have - that should be enough to do slightly over 100mbps but not much more.

There is a chance that Netgear might do much better as it's using Annapurna Labs Alpine AL-514 CPU which was designed for NAS usage and is capable of encrypting at some 200MB/s (I mean Mega Bytes) on the fly using AES. The problem might be that OpenVPN does not seem to use any hardware acceleration for AES anyway, so who knows.

As for DD-WRT on EA9500v2 - you might be able to flash OpenWRT via a serial cable but setting OpenVPN on OpenWRT is tedious. As you most likely know firmware is signed by Linksys (because they hate us all) so there is no chance to simply flash any firmware via web interface and it's most unlikely that it will ever be.

Again - sorry for OT, but where else could I have posted this.

EDIT:
Some amendments - openssl does support AES-NI and both routers support some form of hardware acceleration.

AES 256 benchmark on R9000
aes-256 cbc 66207.29k 70921.65k 73214.12k 73909.59k 74125.27k ( source)

AES 256 benchmark on BCM4908 (the same CPU that powers Linksys EA9500v2)
aes-256-cbc 176224.43k 435001.54k 675722.07k 795995.00k 839831.90k ( source)

So I was wrong on both counts - hardware acceleration is supported and somehow despite HW acceleration present, Alpine CPU is much slower at encryption (possibly hardware acceleration is not enabled).
These are off course great results anyway for both routers.

for comparison Netgear R7000 Nighthawk :
aes-256 cbc 24490.42k 26560.11k 27234.05k 27310.52k 27374.93

 

@downloads
I've read of cases (for example here) where the Asus RT-AC86U is giving OpenVPN speeds of around 200 Mbps - this is on a slightly inferior CPU Broadcom 4906 dual core 1.8ghz. So in theory the Asus GT-AC5300 and Linksys EA9500V2 with a superior 64 bit Broadcom 4908 quadcore 1.8ghz chipset should at the very least match that OpenVPN performance. You're probably right, the EA9500V2 will never be supported by DD-WRT (thanks Linksys! ), however LEDE seems to be by hooking up a cable to its internal guts.

 

Purely clock for clock the Cortex A53 (EA9500v2) is much slower like 2.3 DMIPs/MHz vs 3.39 & 3.5 DMIPs/MHz on the Krait Cores (R7800) and Cortex A15 (R9000) respectively. However I believe Broadcom modified the A53 with a much better hardware crypto engine that’s why units like the Asus AC86U, GT5300 and EA9500v2 perform so well in VPN. On the flip side the Krait (IPQ8065 is basically a dual core version of the Snapdragon 600) and Cortex A15 would theoretically be able to maintain higher throughout without hardware acceleration due to more powerful cores especially with hardware nat acceleration breaking features like QoS and traffic stats enabled. Also with the newer gen BCM4366 WiFi chip in these newer units apparently Broadcom fixed their terrible MU-MIMO implementation.

 

@Aivxtla Still what surprised me is that R9000 uses Annapurna Labs Alpine AL314 CPU which is also used for example in QNAP 431-P2 and QNAP advertises that NAS as being able to write/read at 220MB/s with full AES 256 encryption.

This is why I'm pretty sure that R9000 is capable of far more than that openssl benchmark indicates.

 

Netgear also did not enable the crypto then, if I remember correctly either Voxel (Custom stock firmware) or Kong (DD-WRT) mentioned this.

However I believe the NAS advertising high speed is due it not having to do NAT/packet inspection etc that a router would do, it's just within LAN, that's just my guess.