Asus RT-AC3200 review

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.