Asus RT-AC68U review

We tested the AC68U’s wireless capabilities with our Centrino 2 laptop’s integrated Wi-Fi adaptor, but this is relatively old hardware now and can’t match the full speed of an 802.11ac router at 5GHz, nor does it support 2.4GHz TurboQAM. At 2.4GHz, we got transfer speeds of 40Mbit/s at 1m, 32.7Mbit/s at 10m and 9.7Mbit/s at 20m when using our laptop’s Wi-Fi. The next step was testing with Asus’s £60 USB-AC53 Wi-Fi adaptor, which roughly doubled throughput, achieving speeds of 87.6Mbit/s at 1m, 65.8Mbit/s at 10m and 23.6Mbit/s at 20m.

In our 5GHz test, even our laptop’s integrated wireless chipset worked well with the router to produce speeds of 70.2Mbit/s at 1m, 63Mbit/s at 10m and 25.5Mbit/s at 20m. Using a proper AC wireless dongle again more than doubled performance, producing speeds of 158.45 at both 1m and 10m, which slipped to a still-fantastic 70.6Mbit/s at 20m. Even better was the router’s performance in conjunction with the £70 PCE-AC68 PCI-E wireless adaptor, which saw it maintain a transfer speed of 149.9Mbit/s at a distance of 20m and 209.7Mbit/s at 1m.

This is one of the most expensive routers around, and few people will be able to justify the price of both this and the PCI-E adaptor required to achieve its optimal wireless transfer speeds. However, if you need the very fastest Wi-Fi around, this is the Ultimate router for you.