Netgear R7000 Nighthawk review

WI-FI PERFORMANCE

As good as the R7000 looks and behaves, it’s speed that matters. We tested the 802.11ac performance of the R7000 with the Netgear A6200 Wi-Fi adaptor (£41, www.pixmania.co.uk). We recorded speeds of 158Mbit/s at one metre, 149Mbit/s at 10 metres and 119.8Mbit/s at 25 metres. These are mightily impressive scores, especially the 25 metre result. It’s faster than the Ultimate award-winning Asus RT-AC68U router in our long distance test and just a little slower in our one metre and 10 metre tests. These are good results.

We recorded speeds that were twice as fast with the excellent Netgear R6300 router, but as the 802.11ac standard was in its infancy we had to use two R6300s in bridge mode to conduct our wireless tests rather than an adaptor. Our lab is a harsh test environment for any router because it’s heavily congested with Wi-Fi traffic on both bands, and we think that you could get even higher wireless speeds in a home setting.

We also tested the R7000’s 2.4GHz band performance with the A6200 adaptor and were pleased to see speeds of 81.3Mbit/s at one metre, 74.1Mbit/s at 10 metres and 19.2Mbit/s at 25 metres. These are excellent speeds , as were the speeds we saw when we used our laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi adaptor: 46.6Mbit/s at one metre, 40.6Mbit/s at 10 metres and 11.7Mbit/s at 25 metres. Again, this compares well with the Asus RT-AC68U, which produced speeds of 40Mbit/s at one metre, 32.7Mbit/s at 10 metres and 9.7Mbit/s at 25 metres on the 2.4GHz band using our laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi adaptor.

We like the look, features and performance of the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk, and if you need an exceptionally fast 802.11ac router we have no hesitation in recommending it.