People usually don’t spend a lot of time, when they choose wireless home router, but bad choice of device can make usage of it so uncomfortable. Today, we will find out what you can get from the latest model of router from ASUS company — RT-N66U.
ASUS RT-N66U specifications
- Type: wireless router
- Connection standards: 802.11a/b/g/n, which provide router to work in frequency from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz
- Ports: 1 Gigabit WAN port and 4 Gigabit LAN ports.
- CPU and memory: BCM4706 (with clock frequency of 600 MHz) and 256 MB of RAM.
- Optional: UPnP support, print and file server.
Appearance and design features
Beautiful design for router isn’t important, because most of the time it stands in place, where no one sees it, but ASUS company is proud of ASUS RT-N66U appearance. It can be understood, knowing that this router has unofficial name — Dark Knight. This name was given for obvious merits in the design of this model. “Checkered” texture face of device looks very beautiful and
Moreover, in router’s bundle you can find stand with tricky shape. You can use it to set your router in a vertical position on table or other surfaces. All ports will be on top, so it’s not very smart solution to put router in a vertical position.
By the way, about ports: list of ports is default. There are Gigabit WAN port, 4 Gigabit LAN ports, 2 USB ports, 3 ports for external antennas, power supply input, power button, reset and WPS buttons. WPS button is used to quick connection new customers to the network by one click.
How router works
ASUS RT-N66U is a dual band router. It means that owner can have two wireless networks at the same moment. One of them works on frequency of 2.4 GHz and second on frequency of 5 GHz. Better to use second for new devices n comparison with first, that should be used for backward compatibility with old clients. It’s so important because if wireless network has at least one 802.11 g standard device connected, network will work with maximal connection speed of 54 Mbps. Two bands provides to avoid this unpleasant situation.
Router supports three spatial streams. It provides to increase maximum connection speed to 450 Mbps. The most of modern routers can easy connect to router with this connection speed. Web-interface provides owners to manage its router as they want. There are a lot of different things that you can change using web-interface, so we don’t list them there. Router also supports function of “guest” network with limited capabilities. Moreover, you can manage your network using Telnet or SSH connection.
Built-in USB ports support connection of hard disks and printers. Router can serve as a file server, print server, media server and torrent client. NTFS, FAT32 and ext2/3/4 file systems are supported when router works.
Performance
ASUS RT-N66U has powerful Broadcom CPU. It is based on MIPS architecture and has a clock frequency of 600 MHz. Due to this, it shows good performance: average speed of copying files from PC to PC is about 89 MB/s if you use RAM-disk. Connection of one of the computers via Ethernet and second via Wi-Fi will fall to 41 MB/s. Speed of copying files from one subnet to another using FTP is about 67 MB/s. These results fully reveals Gigabit network potential of RT-N66U. Personally, we are interested to see the speed of reading/writing of files when you access an external hard drive connected to USB port of the router. It turned that file system strongly influence on speed. The best result are with usage of NTFS. NTFS provides to writing and reading of data speed is about 25-30 MB/s (very good result for real tasks). Stability is also on high level. Router would work very stable if you try to download something via torrent-client. ASUS RT-N66U coverage range is from 2.4 to 5 GHz, so your network will be showed for users on large distances.
Conclusion
ASUS RT-N66U belongs to major league of wireless home routers, analyzing its features and quality: interesting design, excellent performance speed, good stability and many functions. That is really good choice for your house. Price is default for this router class, but provides you more profit than losses. There are 5 reasons why you should choose ASUS RT-N66U:
- Dual bands technology;
- MIMO 3×3:3 support;
- High performance;
- Stability;
- Good speed
- Satisfactory speed of access to files on USB drive.
Moreover, there is only 1 reason, which can make you unhappy: inconvenient location of ports if you put your router in vertical position.