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ASUS GT-AC5300 Quick Look

High-end routers have, by now, decidedly all come fitted with eight legs, erm, antennas. Joining their ranks is ASUS latest high-end router designed for extreme gaming, the ROG Rapture GT-AC5300, which was launched earlier this year in March. Here’s a quick preview of the router.

The GT-AC5300 is a tri-band AC5300-class router. This means it has three radios, one on the 2.4 GHz band and two more on the 5 GHz band. The total bandwidth of 5,300 Mbps comprises 1,000 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 2,167 Mbps on each of the 5 GHz band.

Like many of the high-end routers, the GT-AC5300 supports 4×4 MU-MIMO technology, which permits multiple user devices to simultaneously receive data streams on the same radio.

The usual 4 numbers of LAN ports have been upped to 8 numbers of Gigabit Ethernet ports on the GT-AC5300. Two of these ports support link aggregation, which means they can be combined to create a single 2 Gbps link. You could connect this to a NAS that similarly supports link aggregation to get speeds faster than 1 Gbps.

The GT-AC5300 also supports dual-WAN, where you can use one of the LAN ports as a second WAN port to serve as a failover or load-balancing function. Alternatively, you can plug in a USB cellular dongle to serve as the 2nd WAN connection.

To enjoy the ROG moniker, the GT-AC5300 has got to be more than just a great Wi-Fi broadband router. It needs to do something for gamers. Some of these are useful. For example, the GT-AC5300 has many preconfigured settings to support popular games. Prioritising gaming traffic, for example, is easily configured by selecting the game, rather than having to tinker with the settings manually.

On the other hand, some other gaming features are just skin deep. The AiProtection in other ASUS routers is called Game IPS on the GT-AC5300.

The ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 retails at S$559.

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