Netgear Nighthawk X6 - Review
A couple of days ago, Netgear kindly sent me their latest router in the home consumer department, the Nighthawk X6, for my honest review. As a guy who develops software for a living, when I arrive at home, I like to enjoy my setups and realize how much they help me on my digital life. Right now, I have two access points for my home network, which help me a lot to coverage all the house with 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi, with nearly maximum signal. This means I can transfer data to and from my devices at the top speed 802.11n wireless can give. And I’m pretty happy with it. 802.11ac is the new wireless standard, and it’s about to become part of every device we can buy today. Even my smartphone supports wireless ac. Theoretically, it can achieve speeds of up to 1300 Mbps in a single 5GHz band. Netgear introduced a new concept in their newest X6 router. It incorporates Broadcom’s new 5G XStream chipset (more info here), and gave the designation of a Tri-Band WiFi router because it incorporates two 5GHz bands, each one of them capable of 1300 Mbps theoretical speed, and one 2.4GHz band, capable of 600Mbps speed, totalling 3200 Mbps theoretical speed combined. This is what they advertise in the box “AC3200”. You’ll never get that speed on a single wifi connection with today standards, but it looks promising in a scenario where you have multiple users connected simultaneously. But still, to push the router to its full capacity, you need to have compatible clients with the latest 802.11ac standards.
This router is equipped with a single dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor and three offload processors for each radio interface, which help to free some resources from the main unit for high demanding tasks, such as ReadyShare or VPN, which are a few of many features this router has in its firmware. It is also equipped with 128MB of flash and 256MB RAM, making it one of the best hardware featured home router. I received this router with the firmware version V1.0.1.28_1.0.84, and I was quite unhappy knowing it didn’t had the QoS features the older brother R7000 has. But thankfully, yesterday Netgear launched a new version with the so long promised feature. What Dynamic QoS does is to improve the router’s Internet traffic management through better application and device identification, bandwidth allocation, and traffic prioritisation techniques. In essence, if a client is downloading a large file, the user playing an online game or having a video call on Skype, won't be affected. The router will recognise those applications and prioritise the traffic. Technical aspects aside, let’s dig in and open this big box.
Unboxing
I was quite amazed with the size of the box. I have unboxed some routers last years, and this is the biggest box I have ever faced with. First looks, we feel like dealing with a very premium device by the looks and the touch of it.
Here I compare the size with my Macbook Air 13''.
Opening the box, we find the router itself, sealed in a thick protective plastic, a resource CD, a quick install guide in several languages, a power brick (yes, like those used on laptops), two AC power cable extensions (in this box, I received one CEE 7/7 and one Type N), and a RJ45 yellow cable.
I have to say, this router is big, really big. I have a Linksys WRT610N as my main router, and this X6 easily takes the space of two of those Linksys. Big and heavy. We are dealing with 1.1 Kg… on a router. All of it makes this device look promising. This router goes with the “stealth” design of the Nighthawk brand, with a grill covering the top of the router and six folded antennas. While unfolding the antennas, I found them kind of cheap. They sway a bit, and the plastic feels fragile. I think Netgear could have done a better job on the choice of the materials, even more considering the £250 price tag (€310). But ignoring that, the rest of the router feels solid and definitely has presence. If you’re like me and like to show off your tech stuff, you definitely will enjoy having this piece of hardware laying around your desk.
Looking at the top, we find LEDs indicating Power, Internet, LAN ports, WiFi radios, WPS and WiFi on/off switch.These are really quite bright even in a bright environment, but thankfully Netgear included an on/off switch for the LEDs on the back, which is an intelligent thing to do, as it gives the user the capacity to choose. Also, it incorporates an USB2.0 and USB3.0 for printer and storage, four LAN ports for wired devices, one WAN port for internet connection, reset button, power plug and power switch.
First boot and installation
The Nighthawk X6 comes preconfigured with two SSIDs (both for the 2.4GHz radio and 5GHz) and a password. After some time waiting for it to boot up (almost 2 minutes) and connecting to the router via ethernet or wifi, it immediately opens a browser window asking if the user wants to restore previous definitions from a backup file or if he wants to proceed with a new installation. It automatically tries to detect an Internet connection, and in my case it was unsuccessful, for a very simple reason. Here at my place, I have a fiber optic Internet service, with IPTV and VoIP. It all comes into the router through a single ethernet cable, with different VLANs. With this Netgear, we are able to configure those VLANs to the LAN ports. In my case, I had to configure VLAN 100 to Internet, 101 for VoIP and 105 for IPTV. It all worked great, except for VoIP, which is unfortunate. I was hoping to have some more configuration capabilities on the VLAN settings, as we find on the OpenWrt firmware. After trying several times to get VoIP working with the Netgear with no success, I decided to configure my old TP-Link with OpenWrt in order to behave as a VLAN switch, forwarding Internet and IPTV to the X6, and VoIP to my adapter.
Wireless Configuration
One of the best features of this router is the availability of three wireless radios. They are used together to provide users three “highway lanes”, assuring low demanding devices do not obstruct the high demands from other clients. This helps to eliminate slow connections and its drops. The Nighthawk X6 has the most generic configuration preconfigured right out of the box, and I think it works great for the average user, which just wants to plug it in and be online as quick as possible. I think Netgear managed to work this detail pretty well, and I’ll give five stars on it. But as a techie guy, I want to be able to manage and change those settings. We can have the 5GHz radios behaving as a single one, with Smart Connect, or separate it in two wireless bands with different SSIDs. It’s also possible to select the wireless channels where we want the radio to run, but I would like to have the possibility to choose any channel than just the four available for each radio. Netgear separates the lower frequencies from the higher frequencies, and I get this. The user can not take the risk of overlapping frequencies and making the two bands run in the same channel, which could lead to poor performance. This router can take a considerable amount of power depending on the number of users connected to it and how are they pushing it. Netgear claims a power usage of up to 60W. Considering this, it is nice to see some power saving features on this router, such as the ability to schedule periods to turn off the radio interface. And I must say, I’m still struggling for it to work. Every time I add a period to power off the 5GHz radio and hit “apply”, the router reboots and stops giving IP’s to my clients. Even setting up an IP on one of my clients, I have no Internet connection. Every time I try this, I end up resetting the router using a paperclip and restoring it using a backup file. I contacted the Netgear support team, and they are trying really hard to get over this issue. They first recommended me to install a previous version of the firmware. The router I received came with the V1.0.1.28_1.0.84 firmware installed. I updated with the new V1.0.2.44_1.0.96, but it didn’t fix the schedule issue. In the next few days, Netgear will provide me a beta firmware to check if it fixes the problem. For test purposes, I ended up enabling Smart Connect and let the router manage in which band to put my wireless clients.
Performance Tests
I wanted to test this router in my current environment, without getting too scientific with data, benchmarks and results. I currently live in a flat with two bedrooms, an office, living room, kitchen and two bathrooms. I placed the router in the middle of the apartment, where I have an ATI closet with the ONT and the VoIP adapter. This location is preferable because it gives the best possible coverage for the entire home. For the wireless tests, I created two scenarios: testing close to the router (1 meter) and testing in the office, which is about 10 meters from the communications closet, with some walls and corners in between. In the office I have a desktop PC with an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, and for being hard to move it around, I didn’t test it really close to the router. Also, I used my Macbook Air mid-2011 with wireless N (2.4GHz and 5GHz), some smartphones and a tablet I have laying around at my place (OnePlus One, Nexus 4 and a Surface RT). I started by doing a speedtest from Ookla, connected directly via gigabit ethernet, and this was the result:
Then, I connected my desktop PC with wireless AC, and I got a slightly lower result:
Of course this is expectable, but I was quite impressed on how low the difference was. The wireless signal using the 802.11ac standard, 10 meters away with walls and corners was 99%, as you can see in the details on Windows 8:
Compared to the 80% from the 2.4 GHz signal, the difference was considerable, but not by much. I get a much better signal at this distance from the R8000 than my previous Linksys WRT610N, which is great.
Unfortunately I catch up a lot of wireless noise from other nearby devices from other apartments, and I was really happy knowing how good the Nighthawk was in getting through that interference and getting this coverage easily.
For LAN performance I used my Netgear ReadyNAS 102 connected through gigabit ethernet to perform some read and write tests and get some overall speeds. This NAS is capable of read speeds of about 90 MB/s, and write speeds of 50 MB/s. For the control test, I copied a 2GB file from the NAS to my desktop PC (Samsung 850 EVO) through ethernet cable, and I got an average speed of 100 MB/s.
Connecting through wireless ac, I got 30 MB/s speeds.
Considering the Intel 7260ac wifi card having a maximum theoretical speed of 867 Mbps (108MB/s), and the fact that I was testing with a considerable distance, I find this value very satisfying. Most of the time I use my mid-2011 Macbook Air to get my work done, and often I have to transfer files to my NAS. I can only count with a theoretical 450Mbps from the wireless N card. So here is how it handles:
Clearly we can conclude that the wireless N on the 5GHz band at bigger distances can’t really keep up with a good rate. But this is general, and I had the same issue with my old router. Despite the lower transfer speeds, I get a considerable better range on the 2.4GHz band with the Netgear and good transfer rates.
ReadyShare
The Nighthawk R8000 has a feature called ReadyShare. It’s possible to connect a USB drive onto one of the ports (preferably the USB3.0 for higher speeds), and share it across the network. It is easily mapped on Windows, and you can also configure it as a backup device, like Apple Time Machine, or using ReadyShare Vault software. But it can’t do both sharing storage and backup, so we have to decide which functionality to use. In order to test the transfer speed using ReadyShare, I connected a NTFS formatted WD Elements 2.5’’ 1TB hard drive to the router’s USB3.0 port, and connected to a Samba share from my Macbook. I ran three simple tests at two distances, as the previous one. This were the results:
Looking to the raw performance of the router to handle transfers to a hard drive, we are dealing with 55 MB/s speeds, which I think is pretty impressive. I saw some NASs getting lower speeds than this. The offload processors make a tremendous job keeping clear the main dual core processor to this kind of tasks. I can easily configure the R8000 as a backup device and expect good speeds while backing up, without the hassle of connecting the hard drive to the Macbook. I didn’t test ReadyShare with wireless ac, but looking at these results, at 10 meters we could easily get transfer speeds of about 30 MB/s (which is faster than wireless N in the 5 GHz band, at 1 meter).
Streaming HD content
I had to test this router streaming content with some of the devices that are being used at my place. To perform this test, I prepared six different 1080p MKV files and stored in my ReadyNAS 102, and six distinct devices, distancing about 10 to 15 meters from the router:
In the 2.4 GHz band, I connected a Raspberry Pi Model B at my living room plugged in to a HD TV, running KODI;
My desktop PC using wireless ac;
Macbook air at the office, wireless N at 2.4 GHz;
Smartphone OnePlus One at the bedroom, wireless N at 2.4 GHz;
Smartphone Nexus 4 at the office, wireless N at 2.4 GHz,
Microsoft Surface RT at the bedroom, wireless N at 2.4 GHz.
Each device was playing a different MKV file, and there was absolutely no glitches in any device. I was really impressed when I was jumping to different parts of the movies in all devices. It was fast, and it never broke or slowed down at any given time. Here we can see how good the Nighthawk R8000 handles wireless to a considerable amount of devices. It takes the multi device experience to a whole new level. I would like to push it a little more, but I was out of devices to connect to it.
Final Remarks
During this review, this router made me have mix fillings about it. It is one of the most expensive you can buy today. At this price tag, we find the Asus RT-AC3200, the D-Link AC3200 and the Linksys EA9200-4A, and at the hardware level, they share the same specs: dual core CPU, three wifi bands, USB3.0 for drive sharing, and their own implementation of QoS. Netgear has some serious competition in this segment. When I began this review, I was expecting nothing less than top performance from this router, which I did found. Excellent wireless throughput in all bands, excellent range and coverage, and really good stability. For the past two weeks, I haven’t seen a single drop in connection or any slowdown. On the downside, the plastic used on the chassis could be firmer, especially on the antennas. And I have to say, I was a little bit disappointed with the issues regarding the schedule on powering down the wireless interface. I spent too much time trying to find which setting could be responsible for causing the router not to give any IP address after reboot. I hope this gets fixed soon. With this issue, I had the opportunity to see how well the Netgear Support team dealt with this problem. During an entire week, my support case was dealt by three experts. Despite missing some information that I already provided in older messages and having to repeat myself once or twice, the treatment was very good, and I really liked how fast they were answering back. The QoS feature was missing in the previous firmware, but thankfully it is built in the last release, adding value to the router and helping to justify even more the price tag. I think this router is a top of the line, but I’m afraid there is still place to have a much more improved firmware, and preferably, more customisable options for those power users.
So, my final word is, if you have high demands on your home network, don’t want to experience connection drops on your devices, want no headaches setting up your router but are prepared to deal with some minor glitches (which I’m sure will be solved in time), and, especially, want to be future proof, this is definitely a smart choice to buy.