NETGEAR Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500 WiFi Router Review

Interface: Special Features

These special features aren’t necessarily unique, but they aren’t standard either. But, some of them are both.

Geo-Filter

The Geo-Filter allows you to limit connections to just gaming servers close to you. You can set it per device, per game, and per location.

By default, there is a good list of popular multiplayer games to pick from. This allows you to add them with just 2 clicks. While some are game specific, other are engine specific such as Source Engine or Unreal Engine.

QoS

The QoS feature can help make sure that the right systems and traffic gets priority. Give your game system the best power and prevent your siblings or spouse from taking your bandwidth with their Netflix streaming. This is also why the initial setup measures our internet connection, to know how much you have at your disposal.

You can allocate bandwidth by device very easy. Just drag the respective number in the allocation graph. It’s that easy.

You can also prioritise traffic based on service and watch the information of said.

We have a list similar to the one we saw in the geo-filter section, but with more options.

We can also switch to the advanced section here and define it all manually. This allows you to take the function outside of the gaming realm too.

Device Manager

The device manager is a network map. It shows online as well as offline devices known by the router – and how they’re connected to each other.

Network Monitor

The network monitor doesn’t surprise a lot in the sense of what it does. The name gives it away. Get a view of the used bandwidth per device and in total

System Information

The last section here is the system information. This isn’t a unique feature as such, but it looks awesome. It’s also very fast when loading, especially when compared to other router operating systems. It’s close to instantaneous. From this page, you can pin the individual parts too, which then will show up on the initial dashboard.