In almost every test, the Nighthawk came out on top. Since both seem to be geared more toward heavy gameplay, I wanted to see their reliability, speed, and range.
I was leery of the Nighthawk’s blatant warning about a magnet in its docking port, though, as magnets and computers don’t mix very well, but it’s great if you have a wall magnet to mount behind your PC or laptop. Both are large and come with docking ports, which makes them adaptable to desktops and laptops. Netgear Nighthawk A7000-10000SĪs they’re fairly close in terms of cost, I tested the Asus against the Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 (view on Amazon) to see how they held up to each other. If you think that spending these amounts seems exorbitant, there are cheaper models out there on the market, and given the lackluster performance, it’s not worth paying such a high price.Īsus USB-AC68 vs. Lifewire / Rebecca Isaacs Price: Expensive for what you getĪt $90 MSRP, this is definitely considered a top-tier adapter. Otherwise, the laptop would be lopsided thanks to its gargantuan size. It’s so big, in fact, that the adapter itself comes with a separate docking port for laptop users. This adapter is massive, at 1.2 x 0.7 x 4.5 inches (LWH). The Asus USB-AC68 is a beast of a Wi-Fi adapter, looking like something you’d see out Star Trek with an alien-like red and black design. However, after four days of use, I tossed the Asus aside, disappointed, and unimpressed by reliability, speed, and design-and the sheer number of times I died in my games. With incredible speeds of up to 1300 Mbps on a 5GHz network, a plethora of both internal and external antennae, and Ai Radar for wireless amplification, it should be able to handle anything. Gaming Wi-Fi adapters, such as the Asus USB-AC68, aim to increase the Wi-Fi speeds to ensure fast, reliable gameplay. When I’m slashing at hordes of the undead on Day 7 in 7 Days to Die, or when I’m in the middle of a quest in Lord of the Rings Online, the last thing I need is to have my internet cut out on me.
Keep reading for our full product review.
We prefer the Asus RT-AC68U, which delivers more balanced all-round performance, but this Linksys isn’t far behind.We purchased the Asus USB-AC68 Dual-Band USB Wi-Fi Adapter so our expert reviewer could thoroughly test and assess it. It’s speedy, easy to set up and manage, flexible and, most importantly, reasonably priced. The EA6900 is an excellent 802.11ac router.
Still, there isn’t much wrong with sequential read and write speeds of 28.6MB/sec and 19MB/sec – they’re not far behind – and such results make it possible to employ the EA6900 as an occasional NAS drive. We also tested the speed of shared storage over Gigabit Ethernet and found performance to be rapid, but again slower than the Asus. On balance, we prefer the Asus’ results – it’s a better all-rounder. Over 2.4GHz, we measured close-range speed at 19.2MB/sec and long range at 6.3MB/sec. Testing with a 3×3-stream Asus PCE-AC68 PCI Express x1 card, and using iPerf to measure maximum bandwidth, the router hit 72.4MB/sec over 5GHz at close range – faster than the Asus RT-AC68U – but 23.8MB/sec in our long-range test, which is slightly down on the Asus’ performance.