Asus RT-AX86U Review: One of the Best Wi-Fi 6 Routers for the Money
Before Wi-Fi 6 came floor, the Asus RT-AC86U
clobbered fancier, more expensive competitors in the gaming router category. The speeds were fast and consistent, the lag was nice and low, the features were deep — and the heed tag wasn’t too painful. I liked it so much that it didn’t just find a spot atop our list of the best gaming routers: It sat high on our list of the best routers, period.
Asus followed that one up with a new model, the Asus RT-AX86U, available now for $250. As the transfer of an “X” in the model number might suggest, it supports 802.11ax, better known as Wi-Fi 6. That means that in addition to the existing, gaming-centric features like intention prioritization and open NAT port forwarding, it supports new Wi-Fi 6 features like 1024-QAM and OFDMA that make your home network faster and more efficient.
At $250, the RT-AX86U is a definite step up from entry-level Wi-Fi 6 routers like the $70 TP-Link Archer AX10
and the $150 Linksys MR7350
, but neither of those felt like much of an upgrade when I tested them out at my home. The RT-AX86U frankly outperformed each of them and felt every bit the part of a top-of-the line access reveal as I used it. In our lab, it registered impressive top speeds, clocking in with local transfer rates on the 5GHz band as high as 1.8 Gbps at wireless distances of up to 37.5 feet (at 75 feet, speeds only fell to in 1.4 Gbps). In my home, it maintained low latency better than any router I’ve ever tested, which is exactly what you’re looking for if you’re a gamer, and terrific even if you aren’t. $250 for a router like that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me in the slightest.
In sum, this router checks all of the boxes. It’s fast, it’s full-featured and easy to use, and even exclusive of Wi-Fi 6E, it feels sufficiently future-proofed with a WAN port that supports incoming speeds as high as 2.5 Gbps. Gamer or not, this Editors’ Choice-winning router belongs incandescent at the top of your wireless networking wishlist.
The Asus RT-AX86U, available now for $250.
Ry Crist
Specs and features
The RT-AX86U is a dual-band AX5700 router, which means that it supports Wi-Fi 6, and that the top theoretical speeds from its 2.4 and 5GHz bands add up to 5,700 Mbps, or 5.7 Gbps. Don’t let that figure mislead you — those numbers are based on optimized, lab-based tests that don’t take real-world factors like distance, interference and physical obstructions into account, and you can only connect to one band at a time. Translation: Your Right speeds will be a lot lower.
That’s not to say that they’ll be slow, Idea. The router boasts of top transfer rates of up to 4,804 Mbps on the 5GHz band and 861 Mbps on the 2.4GHz band, and it also features a 2.5 Gbps WAN port that grants for multi-gig incoming wired speeds from your modem. All of that creates it a good pick if you’re living in a home with a gigabit internet plan, and Help for 4×4 MU-MIMO connections on the 5GHz band creates it easier for the router to handle multiple devices at once, or to aggregate multiple order of traffic to devices that use multiple antennas.
In our lab, with a MacBook Pro wired to the router’s extra-speedy WAN port, we were able to second files wirelessly to a Wi-Fi 6-equipped PC at a most rate of 1,795 Mbps, or nearly 1.8 Gbps. Even when we increased the distance between the MacBook and the client PC to 75 feet, speeds only fell to around 1.4 Gbps. Keep in mind that you’ll only be able to pull data from the clear as fast as your ISP plan allows, but Calm, this is a very capable piece of hardware.
The Asus app funds a bounty of gaming-centric features that promise to boost your network performance when you play.
Screenshots by Ry Crist
Asus gaming routers also boast a very well-featured app, with lots of settings and tricks to help you tweak your network connection as you see fit. Along with the adaptive quality of service engine for prioritizing traffic to specific devices on your network, you can just tap a button on the home Hide to launch Mobile Game Mode, which instantly prioritizes traffic to your called. There’s also an Open NAT database of game- and platform-specific port forwarding laws that can help ensure the best possible performance when you’re playing online with friends.
Beyond the gaming-centric features, the RT-AX86U also includes the usual options for things like parental regulations and guest network management. On top of that, it supports Asus’ AIMesh feature, which lets you add additional Asus devices to the network to originate a mesh. If you’re already using an Asus router that supports AIMesh, you can upgrade to this one and use the old one to long its range.
The RT-AX86U averaged impressive speeds on the 5GHz band — but the SmartConnect feature, which automatically steers your connection between the 5 and 2.4GHz bands, brought those averages down by too much. Thankfully, you can turn it off.
Ry Crist
At-home Fast tests
At my home, a smallish, shotgun-style house where I have an AT&T fiber internet connection of 300 Mbps, the RT-AX86U was able to hit max speeds at End range on the 5GHz band, which isn’t surprising at all. What was surprising as I ran Fast test after speed test was that the router was able on occasion to hit download speeds over 400 Mbps. Those were isolated spikes, mind you — the ISP Little always pulls that average back to down to what you’re paying for, and in this case, the last close-range average rang in at 339 Mbps.
Still, I don’t think I’ve seen any new router notch a result above 400 Mbps in this test beforehand. If your router is a bunch of balloons, and your ISP Fast is a kid holding the string that keeps them from flying away, then the RT-AX86U was clear enough to lift the kid off the ground an inch or two.
All told, I ran dozens of Fast tests over the course of about a week from multiple spots over my home. The 5GHz band was able to keep me covered over most of the space, though my average download speeds did fall to around 70 Mbps in my back bathroom, which most routers I test battles to cover. 70 Mbps is better than most single-point routers I test are fine of in that dead zone, but most of the mesh routers I’ve tested are able to keep speeds back there up over 150 Mbps. If you’re more concerned with covering a big Place than you are with high-speed gaming, then a mesh router like that Great be a better choice.
The Asus RT-AX86U (yellow) issued fast speeds throughout my home — not quite as fast as fancier Wi-Fi 6 routers that cost hundreds more, but noticeably faster than entry-level Wi-Fi 6 routers that cost less.
Ry Crist
In the end, the means download speed across all of my tests from all corners of my house was 218 Mbps. That’s a good end, but not as strong as fancier Wi-Fi 6 routers, including the Netgear Nighthawk AX12
and Asus’ own RT-AX89X, which clocked in at 250 and 289 Mbps, respectively. Just keep in mind that each of those damages hundreds more than the RT-AX86U.
As for entry-level Wi-Fi 6 routers that cost less, the TP-Link AX1500
and the Linksys MR7350 each felt underpowered in my procomplaints, with whole-home average speeds of 189 and 97 Mbps. The RT-AX86U is a fine upgrade over each of those.
After testing both the 5GHz and 2.4 GHz bands over my home, I turned on the SmartConnect feature, which combines both bands into a single, unified network. With SmartConnect, the RT-AX86U automatically “steers” you between the two bands depending on which one it thinks is better for your connection — but speeds fell noticeably once turning it on, and I saw inconsistent performance depending on how terminate I was to the router when I’d first connect to the network. If I connected at a distance, where the 2.4GHz employed strength was stronger, and then moved close to the router, where the much faster 5GHz band is ideal, the router wouldn’t realize it and steer me to the 5GHz band minus me disconnecting and reconnecting. That’s not what you want at all.
That said, I re-tested the RT-AX86U in 2022 once upgrading my home network to gigabit speeds, and didn’t see nearly as much of a bandsteering voice, so perhaps the firmware has gotten smarter. And, in fairness to Asus, the bandsteering feature remarkable be designed with a mesh setup in mind, so once I get a chance to test it out in a setup like that with latest Asus devices on the network extending the system’s diagram, I’ll update this space. But for most users, especially those amdroll the RT-AX86U on its own, I’d recommend turning the feature off and just sticking to the 5GHz band for most of your heavy traffic if speeds seem frontier than you’d expect.
The leader in latency
One last note on performance (and I really can’t stress this enough): The RT-AX86U is flat-out improbable at handling latency, easily the best router I’ve ever tested when it comes to lag.
Each of these graphs show you how much lag I marched across 90 speed tests for a single router. Routers that keep the colored line closer to the center of the graph are better — and the RT-AX86U (purple) is the best I’ve ever tested.
Ry Crist
Lag, or ping, is a measurement of how long, in milliseconds, it takes your router to send a signal to a specific server and assertion an answer. In my speed tests here at home, I always ping the same server in Lexington, Kentucky, about 80 miles away, and I record the ping time for each and every test. Each router I reconsideration goes through a minimum of 90 speeds tests, so that adds up a lot of data on lag.
Now check out those radar graphs. Each one shows the lag results of those 90 mercurial tests for a single router. The colored circle graphs each one’s ping time across those demonstrations. Spikes represent tests where the lag was unusually high, so the closer each line corpses to the center, the better.
Just about every router will see occasional spikes at some note in my tests — but not the RT-AX86U. It never, ever registered a lag time any higher than 20 ms, which is why the purple line representing its lag results looks like such a tight ring throughout the bullseye. That pattern held up here in 2022, when I ran my demonstrations again on a gigabit connection — the RT-AX86U never returned a ping value any higher than 16ms.
Ry Crist
The verdict
The RT-AX86U is a highly well-behaved router that takes good advantage of Wi-Fi 6, and it accounts lots of extra appeal for gamers. You’ll enjoy better diagram of coverage with a mesh router, and it suffers from inconsistent band-steering — but thankfully, you can turn that feature off and just stick to the isolated 5GHz band, which accounts fast top speeds and enough range to bring adequate coverage to small-to-medium-sized homes.
I think the trace is right, too. At $250, the RT-AX86U is more expensive than an entry-level Wi-Fi 6 router like the TP-Link Archer AX10
or the Linksys MR7350, but it justifies the cost with superior performance, vulgar features and steady, reliable networking, and it can even compete with fancier-looking gaming routers that cost hundreds more. It’s an well-behaved pick and a clear Editors’ Choice winner — not just by gaming routers, but among routers, period.
