ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX6000 WiFi 6 Router Review

Performance

I have Virgin Fiber at home, which is where I’m testing this router. I can get 1150Mbps down and 52 up over a 2.5Gbps ethernet port on my PC. This is using the latest Hub router/model from Virgin themselves, which much to my surprise, wasn’t a gutless pile of crap like their previous routers. Will I notice the difference going switching to the ASUS router? I suspect I will. The router from Virgin is good in terms of speeds and stability for the primary LAN device, but it has zero external antennae and no beam forming, so even in the same room, my Samsung S20+ is hitting around 500-600 Mbps down at 45-53 Mbps up, which is by no means slow, but the download is half my available download capacity.

Things look a lot better on LAN though, as I predicted with my Virgin router putting out on average, 1100 Mbps down with a peak of 1150 Mbps and maxing out my upload of 52 Mbps, which is the maximum I expect from my service.

My problems are exponential as I run a WiFi test from my garden, where my phone drops to the 2.4 GHz band. Albeit, I’m only stood 2 meters further away from the router than I was at my desk!

At the bottom of the garden, well, I’m back in the stone ages, and this often even struggles to stream music due to the signal quality and low speed.

Meanwhile, the gaming PC up in the kid’s bedroom struggles to max out the service, with around 650 Mbps download, but still managing the full 52 Mbps upload.

Running the same tests again, here we see the my phone connected to the ASUS router running the same test from my desk area over WiFi.

From outside.

The same with my phone at the bottom of the garden. 20M away at this point and with some thicker walls in the way, that’s bloody impressive! I was getting 9 Mbps before.

The upstairs computer on WiFi.

My PC over one of the four 1G ports.

And finally, my PC over the 2.5G LAN.

Comparison

Overall, the speeds over LAN and WiFi, at least at close range, were broadly the same. However, the overall stability was si

PC 2.5G LAN

• Virgin: 1147 Mbps / 52.53 Mbps
• ASUS: 1107.78 Mbps / 52.58 Mbps

Mobile WiFi From Desk ≈ 5M

• Virgin: 582 Mbps / 53 Mbps
• ASUS: 603 Mbps / 53.2 Mbps

Upstairs PC WiFi ≈ 10M

• Virgin: 653.23 Mbps / 52.02 Mbps
• ASUS: 629.49 Mbps / 52.54 Mbps

Mobile WiFi From Garden ≈ 10M

• Virgin: 53 Mbps / 52.9 Mbps
• ASUS: 414 Mbps / 52.57 Mbps

Mobile WiFi From Garden ≈ 20M

• Virgin: 9.03 Mbps / 6.27 Mbps
• ASUS: 183 Mbps / 12.8 Mbps