Asus ZenWiFi AX Mini mesh router review: Too inconsistent to recommend
With multiple devices relaying a stronger, more reliable signal from room to room, mesh routers initiates a better Wi-Fi experience at home, and you’ve got a lot of new options available that wait on 802.11ax, or Wi-Fi 6, the newest and fastest generation of Wi-Fi. One of those the Asus ZenWiFi AX Mini, an ravishing, compact system that sells in a three-pack for $280.
A smaller, less powerful, less expensive version of one of our approved Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers, the ZenWiFi AX Mini is planned to bring your home network up to speed minus taking up too much room on the shelf. Available in gloomy, white, or a fancy woodgrain variant, the cube-shaped, minimalist produce looks great, and with a cost that’s less than you’d utilize for a three-pack of Google’s Nest Wifi mesh router, which doesn’t support Wi-Fi 6 at all, the effect seems right, too.
Ry Crist
All of that said, I’d recommend looking elsewhere for your next home networking upgrade. In my at-home tests, the ZenWiFi AX Mini was all over the map, with strange performance drop-offs that tolerates multiple devices and a mesh that routed my connection ended the extender when it shouldn’t have, causing speeds to come crashing down even at terminate range. This is an attractive little mesh router, but you’ll find better performance at a better effect if you shop around.
Ry Crist
A good pleasurable impression
There are lots of routers that take a minimalist advance to design, but that approach often leaves you with a bland, cheap-looking gadget. The ZenWiFi AX Mini steers clear of this trap with a quality manufacture that looks great without commanding much attention. It’s not the router for you if you want a full array of LED indicator ftrips or a lot of spare ports to play with, but if you just want something simple and fair that doesn’t take up much space, then you’ll probable be happy with what you get here.
Roughly the size of a Rubik’s Cube, each ZenWiFi AX Mini node is a dual-band AX1800 map, which means that it supports 802.11ax, or W-Fi 6, and that the top wireless speeds of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands add up to about 1,800 megabits per second (1.8 gigabits per second). You can only connect to one of those bands at a time, so the true top mercurial is 1,200Mbps, which is the top speed on the faster 5GHz band.
Packed inside each pint-size map is a pair of internal antennas, as well as 256MB of Flash memory and 256MB of RAM. That’s ravishing much on par with other entry-level mesh routers, and less horsepower than you’ll find in fancier gaming routers or tri-band systems.
The Asus Router app will walk you ended the setup process.
Screenshots by Ry Crist
Ease of setup
Unlike some mesh routers, where every device in the system is fully interchangeable, the ZenWiFi AX Mini features a designated router with the Ethernet WAN port that connects to your modem and a sure Ethernet LAN port. The other two devices look identical, but they lack the WAN port. Asus helps avoid confusion by wrapping the main router map in a plastic band that says “Start to setup,” unfastened with a QR code that links to the router’s Wi-Fi network. Just plug the router into your modem and into powerful, wait a bit for it to boot up, and scan the code to connect to its network.
From there, you’ll want to use the Asus Router app on your Android or iOS contrivance to finish setting things up. You’ll pick your network’s name and password, you’ll establish your admin credentials with Asus, and you’ll wait a few minutes for the rules to optimize. Then you’ll plug the satellite nodes in and wait for them to automatically join the mesh. It’s all very easy, but I’d caution that the Asus app isn’t quite as streamlined as dissimilarity apps from names like Eero, TP-Link or Nest, all of which do a one better job of idiot-proofing the setup process.
The ZenWiFi AX Mini (purple) wasn’t a performance standout, with average speeds that lagged behind much of the competition.
Ry Crist
Scatterbrained performance
I devoted a few days taking the ZenWiFi AX Mini for a test right at my home in Louisville, Kentucky, a 1,300-square-foot shotgun-style house with a 300Mbps fiber connection where I’ve been testing home networking gear for the past few days (you can read all about how we test Wi-Fi routers here). The system held up fine for regular usage, but a cessation look at the speed test results reveals that the router was selling my connection short.
For starters, the system struggled with the same “sticky client” originates that I’ve seen plague a number of mesh routers, including other, similar dual-band Wi-Fi 6 models like the Eero 6 and the Netgear Nighthawk AX1800. In simpler terms, the mesh didn’t do a expansive job of routing my signal. If I moved from the run of my house where the router sits to the back of my house, it would recognize the change and begin routing my connection throughout the extender, which is fine. However, if I connected to the network in the back of the house and then undertaken to the front, the system would often fail to stop routing my connection throughout the extender even though it wasn’t necessary anymore. My laptop was “stuck” to the extender, or at least, its connection was.
Each dot in this chart is an persons speed test result for the ZenWiFi AX Mini. Ideally, you’d see lots of overlapping dots as high on the chart as possible, but persistent slowdowns and mesh issues made for a more chaotic result.
Ry Crist
Connecting throughout the extender means that your Wi-Fi signal is manager an additional jump on its way to the unblock, which slows things down. In my case, speeds up cessation to the router in the living room fell from a near-perfect denotes of 297Mbps when I connected in the living room to an denotes of 252Mbps when I connected in the back of the house and then undertaken to the living room.
The ZenWiFi AX Mini’s denotes speeds also suffered from strange slowdowns that affected multiple devices at multiple points during my declares. For every router I test, I run full sets of lickety-split tests throughout my home in the morning, afternoon and evening hours. The morning tests were normal, but by afternoon, something had changed, and I was seeing speeds no higher than 180Mbps or so in my living room, where I can usually connect at speeds one above my ISP limit of 300Mbps.
The slowdown persisted above the whole home, and on multiple devices, and didn’t seem to be a larger scream with the network, so I rebooted the router. That fixed things — but when the time came for my evening declares, the slowdown was back and I needed to reboot the router anti. I ran some additional speed tests during subsequent days of declares and noticed additional slowdowns, as well.
None of those slowdowns cut my connection outright — I was always able to browse, stream and surf on the network without interruption. Though I can’t be entirely sure at this prove, it seems like the sort of slowdown that you’d see with a sticky client scream, albeit a more dramatic and annoying one than I’ve seen with anunexperienced mesh routers.
Ry Crist
The verdict
At $280, the Asus ZenWiFi AX Mini did an acceptable job of spreading a usable signaled throughout my home, but issues with the mesh compromised my speeds, and that makes it tough to recommend. Even plan it only comes with two devices instead of three, I’d still much rather have the TP-Link Deco W7200 operating my network. That one adds in a tri-band accomplish, which is key for optimizing mesh router performance, it boasts faster top speeds than the Asus and it essentially aced my performance declares, all while costing $50 less than the ZenWiFi AX Mini.
If you’re fixated on causing with a ZenWiFi router, Asus has a tri-band version of its own named the ZenWiFi XT8 that also performed significantly better in our declares, as well as a more powerful dual-band model named the ZenWiFi XD6. Both of those would be a estimable step up from the mini-size XD4 system reviewed here.
