Asus RT-AC3200 review

ASUS RT-AC3200 now on deal

The ASUS RT-AC3200 for sure looks intimidating, and so too was its price. Now with this deal from Amazon, though, the spider-like router is much more appealing. You can now save a healthy £98 from its former £241 – that’s a tidy 40% saving.

Buy now from Amazon

If you’re still not convinced then feel free to read our full review below.

It’s hard for a router with six external antennas to avoid looking imposing, but the all-black Asus RT-AC3200 looks even more spider-like than most; it’s not a design for anyone suffering from debilitating arachnophobia.

The router is designed for environments where lots of devices need to connect at once, and where network speed is vital. It’s a tri-band router able to broadcast three simultaneous networks: two on the 5GHz band and one on 2.4GHz. The 5GHz networks have a theoretical throughput of 1,300Mbit/s each with a further 600Mbit/s for the 2.4GHz. This leaves you a staggering combined 3,200Mbit/s of throughput. There’s no built-in modem, so you’ll need to connect it to an ADSL or fibre modem or router for internet access.

The router has a smart connect feature that connects your devices on whichever is the most suitable network according to the device speed, signal strength and the amount of congestion. This is useful if you want a hands-off approach to network management. It does, however, require you to have all three networks broadcasting under the same SSID with a single password. Some people prefer to manage which network is used by each device manually, and you can create individual networks with separate passwords in the router’s admin interface.

Otherwise, there is the usual array of four Gigabit Ethernet ports for your wired network devices and a WAN port for connecting a modem or another router. You can also connect a storage device or a printer to one of two USB ports to share over your network, and one is the faster USB3 standard. You can use Asus AiCloud to access your USB storage remotely through an app for iOS and Android devices, or through a personalised web link in a browser.

As you might expect for a high-performance router, the admin interface is comprehensive, although it might be intimidating for anyone without a lot of networking knowledge. There are useful metrics provided by the traffic analyser so you can see how bandwidth is being distributed around your network and identify any bottlenecks.

Otherwise there are the options you would expect such as Quality of Service, Dynamic DNS and Port Forwarding. You can also set up guest networks to provide internet access for visitors without giving them full access to your network; the router supports a staggering nine different networks.

We tested wireless speeds first with our reference laptop’s integrated 802.11n adaptor. On the 2.4GHz band we saw a transfer rate of 38.9Mbit/s at 10m and 14Mbit/s at 25m. When testing the wireless speeds of the 5GHz bands we noticed slightly differing speeds between the bands, however.

Diving into the router admin, we saw that this was because the two networks use different channel groups. The first network only uses wireless channels between 36 and 48, whereas the second uses channels between 100-140, which are less commonly used and so less congested. On the first 5GHz network we only saw 133Mbit/s at 10m and 83.7Mbit/s at 25m, but when we switched to the second network we saw considerably faster speeds of 181.8Mbit/s and 133Mbit/s respectively.

Asus didn’t provide a USB adaptor for us to test 802.11ac throughput, so we used our reference Trendnet TEW805UB 802.11ac USB adaptor (£10 inc VAT from www.ebuyer.com. Throughput at 10m was identical across both networks at 233Mbit/s, which is underwhelming for a high-end router. At 25m we saw 126.5Mbit/s and 195.7Mbit/s, which are reasonable results.

The RT-AC3200 is undoubtedly a feature-packed router with plenty of functions for those looking to tinker, but in terms of straight wireless speeds we were a little disappointed. The D-Link DIR-890L has superior tri-band performance for the price.