ASUS ROG Rapture GT-A Series

As Good as It gets – Having had a WIFI 7 dual band router in my possession and running it for a few days I was sorely disappointed with the strength of signal , so decided to go back to a full WIFI 6 router with triband . Previous to this I had been running a dual band ASUS RT-AX88U with 2 Triband ASUS AX92U extenders, one set as a repeater and the other as a AP point… Read more

with cable connection. The AX88U had failed after a few years of use and I tossed up between WIFI 6 6e and 7. WIFI 7 did not bring anything new to the table and although I had 6E adapters in my computers the rest of my house was running on 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands.

There was little to be gained by having a dedicated WIFI 6e 6ghz band ,no speed increase and no signal strength increase. The Gt-AX11000 offered me two 5ghz bands and a 2.4ghz band and thus mated well with my existing extenders, and of course the reason I got this was because the price had come down drastically , 6 months ago I would not have considered it. It is a large router as can be seen by the comparison photo, I did expect something that would fit in my hand so the sheer size was a surprise.

The antennas are fixed so don't break these and handle with care.

Setup was easy and signal strength showed a slight increase over my old AX88U .It has Range boost technology claiming a 38% increase in range over a similar product without range Boost, hard to measure though . And...woops...what was that..we just had an earth quake I nearly fell off my chair and the desk is still moving. back to the review.

On both my computers, one in the same room as the AX11000 and the other some 25 metres, maybe 30 away in the rear bedroom I was getting maximum 1201/1201 MB/s with the later falling to 867 on occasions but still strong. NBN connection speed was also strong in this bedroom and on my 100/20 connection I was getting some very good readings, running with the 2 extenders, one as a repeater the other as an AP point. Walls and doors really do knock the signal around , and I could have run this without the extenders but the rear bedroom would have been operating on a very weak signal. I wonder though why we are restricted to these feeble readings when most of the world has 1000/1000 available ?

Running a Smart Tv in this rear bedroom was fine, with once again a strong signal .

The Smart Tv in the second and third bedrooms and in the living room all worked fine with a strong signal hooking up to my Amazon Firesticks quickly.

All my security cameras worked as well as my security doorbell and my smart power point switches connected to the 2.4ghz band without a fuss . Mobile phones had the choice of all the bands and connectors and behaved flawlessly. My two printers also connected without a hassle.

You can see I run a lot of junk , but hey, that's me.

The one thing that I found tricky was the 160mHZ band of which there were three , at first not being available . Previous to this router ,Asus allowed you to choose your region ,in the professional section of the router, choosing Asia would render them unavailable , same with Canada and a number of other countries .This router however did not give you that option . In the end I mucked around with time zone settings and used a VPN to get use of the 160MHZ band .Disconnecting the VPN and rebooting the router , I still had the 160mhz band operating.

Not sure what's going on here and not sure whether I will still have the 160MHZ band available in a week, but we will see. I used the 10Ge connection at the back for the NBN connection even though the manual said to hook up the 2.5 GB WAN connection. I called it a manual, it's just a slip of paper. The router runs a 2GHZ quad core processor which is up from 1.7 on the older model, so there is plenty of grunt. To be honest I am pretty sure the majority of households don't need anything more than WIFI 6 , not from my experience at least, and much of the reviews quoting this figure and that figure mean little in the real world if you can't really see the difference. WIFI 6E is a rare bird and WIFI 7 offers nothing more that what you can get from WIFI 6 . Of course that is going to be different if your a large business or in a congested area like a shopping center, but at present just stick with WIFI 6 , save your pennies till WIFI 8 comes out or 9 or 10 ,but unless they can offer speeds that match your NBN connection forget it. All in all this router is powerful and probably overkill for most users but at the reduced price it made sense for me . Once again I turn off the firewall because it does slow your connection , and you really don't need the Asus security solution , so leave that off as well.

I didn't run mesh because in the past I had too much trouble with drop outs and reconnects so a repeater and a AP point gives me maximum coverage albeit with too many connection confusing choices, so it's best to watch your naming protocols. keep a list in a book so you know what's what.. The other thing of note was that a firmware upgrade was available as soon as I hooked it up . I didn't buy this for gaming but it does have some dedicated setting in the router for gamers, who knows, though, if I get bored I might just start playing and you can connect to gaming servers and you can set priority for gaming..in the setup.

It's hard to beat this router, and it is highly recommended.

Good performance but terrible quality control – I bought this router in September 2020 via eBay. I had used it with joy up to before I found that the paint had come off. Its wireless range covered my home, about 210 sqm in almost all areas. Even though the strength is weak, there is no signal chopping. I used its USB network share by Samba without a big issue. The wired ethernet is also… Read more

good.

However, when I found the ruined paint, I was very disappointed because I had never seen this kind of issue for 50 years since I have used any electronic products. I have tried to resolve this issue because my router lost its value almost.

Firstly, I contacted Asus Australia via servicecenter_au@asus.com with photos, serial numbers, etc. They replied, "please contact your Place of Purchase for further RMA lodgement and assistance." And then, they gave me the same instruction I had done already. It meant I had to repeat the same process to the other department of Asus.

I was disappointed again because they could not forward my request to the department by themselves. They didn't work for customers; they worked for themselves.

I decided to contact the seller because Asus advised me their RMA service would take a long time to repair my router's paint. I could not get any response from eBay's seller even though I tried to contact them directly for over one month. I told this issue to eBay as well, and they also said they don't have any policy to deal with this situation because this seller hasn't answered eBay's request.

I was disappointed again. There is no solution whether the Company (Asus, eBay) is big or small (eBay seller), whether the product has a three-year warranty or not because their mind for the customers is not sincere, I think.

Two years ago, I experienced getting excellent customer services from Intel, Gigabyte and ComputerAlliance.com.au.

Best Coverage and Futureproof – We know that WiFi is progressing very fast and as we know WiFi6 is not the latest at the end of this year or very likely so. But this router still has its place in the future for its great connection and coverage. There is a back room where I will get 1 bar out of 5 based on the laptop display. With this router, I get full bar and connection is… Read more

fast.

This pairs well with the future motherboard with wifi connection as it will provide the stable connection and fast connection speed. No longer the need to find a long lan cable and try to hide and line around the walls or ceiling. Now WiFi connection can providd you that stablr speed that requires for uninterrupted game connection.

Set up you need to have a fair bit of router set up knowledge. Intuitive UI but there is a learning curve on where are the settings is located.

Apart from that is a plug in and forget about what gave you good stable fast wifi connection.