Asus TUF-AX4200

Man, Asus makes a lot of routers. This one, built of charcoal-coloured plastic Batman might consider too aggressively angular, is a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 job with four Ethernet ports, four antennas, and a single USB port.

Compared with some, that's an uninspiring number of appendages, but it really is all you need for a satisfying network experience if you're just trying to share a broadband hookup between a gaming PC, a smart TV, and everybody's phone. Asus also makes a point of the AX4200's open NAT and ease of port forwarding, which will make stable online gaming connections easier.

From the outside, it's not a bad looking unit. From the wedge-shaped school of design, with its four antennas standing straight from the back edge, it's reasonably small, is light, and has wall-mounting slots on the back. It's not completely covered in flashing lights either, so it's going to work in a bedroom where you don't want to wake up in the morning with logos emblazoned on your eyeballs.

There's a degree of future-proofing in the form of a 2.5Gb WAN socket, for when connections that fast become commonplace, and if you use LAN integration on two of the Ethernet ports you'll be able to pipe almost all that bandwidth to a single device—or you could use the 3603mbps of the 5GHz Wi-Fi connection.

As this isn't a Wi-Fi 6 device there's no 6GHz band, and we'd recommend avoiding the 2.4GHz network, or keeping it for low-demand devices, as not only is it congested but on this router tops out at 574mbps. That's still quite a lot, but once you've got a few streaming sticks and phones connected you'll want your gaming PC to use the higher frequency band. There's beamforming onboard too, to maximise the internets in your general direction.

The antennas are permanently attached but still movable, and other than the orange flashed on their sides there's very little that stands out about the AX4200. It's the same sort of basic design we saw on the likes of the RT-N66U back in 2012, whose 450mbps of Wi-Fi 4 (or 802.11n as it was called back then) is greatly outstripped by the current generation.

Still, we're not complaining. A quick check of a well-known shopping site shows we paid £100 for the RT-N66U 11 years ago, so have received a 155% increase in Wi-Fi performance for a 40% increase in price.

It's a simple enough device to use—one thing that has changed since 2012 is how quick and convenient it is to set up a new router nowadays—and if you want make your home network more complicated you can use the AX4200 with Asus' AI Mesh to set up a network of repeaters to pipe memes all around the house. 

The single USB port, which is quite tightly positioned by one of the antennas, and may be an issue if you want to stick a thick USB flash drive in it, can be used to share storage as a media server, AIDisk, Time Machine, FTP or Samba, or to insert a 4G dongle as a backup connection in case the fibre goes down.

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The on-board software, which all runs on a 2.0GHz quad-core CPU with a little bit of RAM and flash storage attached, is well featured. There's adaptive QoS, so you can keep your games machine first in the queue for the internets, a guest network, various bandwidth and traffic monitoring tools, parental controls, an intrusion prevention system and Asus' AIProtection suite which offers malicious site blocking, and can prevent known infected devices from connecting via the router. 

It all adds up to a well-rounded package for a decent price. The AX4200 may not break any records for connection speed, weight, or price, but it's the sort of thing that can upgrade an existing network to Wi-Fi 6 quickly and easily, or form the hub of a new one if you're setting up wireless gaming and streaming for the first time. 

Its ability to deal with 2.5Gbps of input gives it a degree of longevity—it'll be a long time before domestic internet connections reach that level—and if you want something easy to set up, with the important Wi-Fi 6 speeds and features, then this is certainly one for the shortlist.