Asus wants to supercharge your home network with this ultra-fast router

It looks as though Asus is getting ready to release its ROG Rapture GT-AX11000, an ultra-high-speed wireless router built around the 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) standard. While first introduced several months ago, there's now a product page for the router on the company's website, and online retailers are starting to list it as well.

This is yet another modern router that adopts the headcrab design, to accommodate eight external antennas. It looks similar to TP-Link's recently announced Archer AX11000, and like that model, the GT-AX11000 a tri-band router with a combined speed of around 11,000Mbps across all three bands.

It's impossible to combine the three bands into a single connection, but there is plenty of speed to go around on each individual one—up to 1,148Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 4,804Mbps on each of the two 5GHz bands.

The average user doesn't need that kind of performance. Asus is targeting enthusiasts who gravitate towards the top-of-the-line, and anyone wanting to future proof (as much is reasonably possible) their home network. Routers like this are designed to handle crowded networks with high bandwidth needs.

Asus is also targeting gamers with a few software-side optimizations. Specifically, Asus says its Game Boost technology prioritizes gaming packets within the local network to reduce ping times by more than 33 percent compared to competitor's solution (we haven't tested this ourselves). This works in conjunction with GameFirst V, a utility that lets users control gaming prioritization.

Wired connections aren't as robust as the Archer AX1000. Both have a 2.5G LAN port, but Asus's GT-AX11000 has four regular GbE LAN ports compared to TP-Link's eight.

There's still no word on pricing or availability, though we did spot a couple of listings. One is through MWave's online store in Australia, and the other is a cached Newegg entry for a Call of Duty Black Ops edition. We imagine a retail release can't be far behind.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

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