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ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 is THE best WiFi router for gaming. If you are a hardcore gamer, you will heavily emphasize on the CPU and graphics card for a lag-free gaming experience. But, all of this horsepower is of no use if your WiFi router cannot handle the throughput required to overcome the network lag.
ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 is a gaming tri-band router that has been designed specially keeping gamers in mind. This beast offers performance acceleration features – both hardware and software-based, multiple LAN ports, and anti-malware support. All of this is powered by a quad-core processor. This is a must-have router if you are a serious gamer or have a high-traffic home network.
ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 Review
- ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 looks like a giant inverted spider with 8 legs (read antennas). It sports the famous ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) logo.
- The GT-AC5300 has 6 LED indicators placed on the front of the router. These indicators will show you the status of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio bands, the WAN status, LAN and WPS connectivity. On the left hand side of the router, you will find buttons to enable/disable WiFi, initiating WPS and turning on/off the LED.
- Moving on to the back, you will find two USB 3.0 ports, a WAN port, a power and reset button and eight gigabit LAN ports. You can club two of the LAN ports for link aggregation and get a 2Gbps speeds for compatible NAS devices plugged in to the router.
- This 4×4 tri-band 802.11ac router is powered by a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU, 256MB of flash memory and 1GB or RAM. On the 2.4GHz band, ROG Rapture boasts of speeds up to 1000Mbps and speeds up to 2,167Mbps on the 5GHz frequency band. This is possible due to the 1024QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) technology that it uses.
- Simultaneous data-streaming, beamforming and MU-MIMO technology is also supported by the router.
- Setting up the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 will take less than five minutes. You just need to connect the wifi router to your PC or Laptop and type in router.asus.com on your web browser. Follow the the on-screen wizard to set up your wifi router easily.
- While setting up, you get to choose the wireless router mode which also includes Repeater mode, Airmesh mode, AP mode and the Media bridge mode. You also have the option to enable the router to choose the best frequency bands for you.
- We tested the router both on SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO. In our SU-MIMO close range test, the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 delivered a really good throughput of 75Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. When placed at a 30 feet range, the ROG Rapture delivered 128Mbps which is actually quite good.
- The ROG Rapture broke all our previous test records by delivering 601Mbps on the 5GHz close proximity test. At a distance of 30 feet, the GT-AC5300 scored 330Mbps.
- In the MU-MIMO close proximity test, the GT-AC5300 scored 225Mbps and at 30 feet, it provided a speed of 135Mbps.
- We also tested this ASUS router for file transer. The write test of a 1.5B folder with a combination of music, documents and photo files trasnmitted at a speed of 39MBps and the read delivered at 42MBps
ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 – Heavy on Gaming
The GT-AC5300 us heavy on gaming features. Let’s mention a few noteworthy one’s here.
ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 has a feature where in couple of LAN ports automatically get network priority which enables your gaming console to get most of the network bandwidth. It also has a technology called GameBoost that analyses your network traffic and if you are connected on Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and 3Ds, it will prioritise the bandwidth for you.
Powered by WTFast, the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 offers support for GPN (Gamer’s Private Network). For more than 1000 compatible gaming titles, GPN offers a very low latency and an optimised performance along with a private and secure connection the gaming servers.
For users who use a VPN connection, the ROG Rapture has a VPN Fusion feature that allows you to maintain a VPN connection along with your regular internet connection so that all your games keep running at optimum performance.
The ASUS ROG Rapture also comes with powerful security features. The Trend Micro powered IPS (Intrusion Protection System) analyzes your network at regular intervals and protects you from any kind of online threats like virus or malware attack, ransomware attack, or hacking attempts. Pretty cool, huh!
ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 – Final Words
- Excellent throughput performance
- Multitude of gamer friendly features
- Intuitive user interface
- Eight LAN ports
- Quite expensive
- File transfer speed is slow
- Big form-factor
Verdict
ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 is one of the fastest wifi routers that we have tested.
This gaming router offers a hell lot of features. It comes with an intuitive management console that can be leveraged to tweak and optimize your network so that you can have lag-free gaming experience. It has abundant I/O ports and a lot of gamer-friendly features which makes this router the best gaming router for 2020.
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