A Closer Look
The design really is in a league of its own, and a far cry from the often purposefully dull designs we see on routers. They’re not exciting bits of hardware, usually, you just want it on a shelf or tucked out of sight somewhere. Not this one though, it’s got a commanding and eyecatching design, and it even has RGB because… F*** it, why not!
As you can see, it’s got a big bank of indicator LEDs on the front edge, as well as ventilation, cut into the ROG lettering, and a big red ROG eye. If that’s not enough, you’ve got four incredibly chunky antennas, with one on each corner.
They do look utterly fantastic, with a very cool Sci-Fi look to them. You can angle them and turn them are required, but for the most part, just starting with the pointing up and out will be good enough and you can tweak from there.
Around the back, there’s even more ventilation. With a quad-core 2GHz CPU in there, it’s going to need some airflow, and I suspect most of the hardware in here is pretty extreme and needs additional airflow too. There’s a range of ports here too, offering 1 x 2.5G WAN/LAN, 1 x 2.5G LAN, 4 x 1G BaseT for LAN, USB 3.2 Gen 1 and USB 2. So networking your PCs, switches, smart home equipment, gaming system, NAS, printers, and more… yeah, that’s not going to be a problem here. You can use the USB ports for printers, mass storage and more too, even using a HDD for a media server.
In terms of built-in controls, there’s not a lot, just a WPS button, reset, power, and LED control button (I like this one). Of course, everything else is done through the web interface, but we’ll get to that.
