With Covid that took over our lives and everybody is working from home, we really need good Internet and with that a good network infrastructure. Well ASUS has you covered with their new range of WIFI-6 routers and PCI cards. We will be looking at the RT-AX68U router and the PCE-AX58BT PCE card.
The installation of both devices takes really no effort, especially the RT-AX68U router. It took me about 2-4min to get all my settings in on the the router and I was online again. This was also a bit of an upgrade for me from my current ASUS router that I was using up till now. I love the interface of the ASUS routers, they really do give you all the information that you need when you log in.
What I also like about the RT-AX68U is that is compatible with ASUS AI Mesh system. So if you where to get one of the Zen units or even 2 more of the RT-AX68U then you can move from one place in your home to the other side and will not have dropped connections or weak signals. Unfortunately my current ASUS router is still of the older gen that doesn’t support this feature(yes I had to give the router back).
With regards to connectivity of the RT-AX68U it features your 4 standard Gigabit network ports, a Gigabit WAN port and 2 USB connections(the one being a USB3.0 and the other an USB 2.0). The RT-AX68U is powered by a Broadcom chipset that features a 1.8GHz dual core SOC and has 512MB Ram and 256MB flash storage. Compared to my current router I did find on the LAN side that I got a bit better speeds while transferring files between two computers on my wired connection. I did have a bit of a problem with an older notebook that did not want to connect to the RT-AX68U at all, but this I write down to the notebook being full of nonsense.
On the WiFi-6 side of things I also saw an improvement with my S20 Ultra’s connectivity and game performance in Call Of Duty Mobile and in Mobile Legends, I also for some reason saw that my battery usage lasted a bit longer while playing.
The other thing that I love about the ASUS router range is the App that you can use to control and see what’s happening on your network, and this is a feature that I use a lot with my current router and the test unit. Setup is real easy as well.
Moving over to the PCE-AX58BT, now this for me a real treat as I am still running a Z170 platform and never had WIFI on my board. Again installation was very easy, open your case insert into your PC slot and make sure that you have a spare(you should have)onboard USB connector. The onboard USB connector is so that you can take advantage of the cards built in Bluetooth 5.0 connection.
Switching over to the WIFI connection (5GHz mode) gave me speeds that is pretty close to my wired connection to the router. Unfortunately I didn’t have any Bluetooth devices to test with the unit.
Overall I was really happy with the PCE-AX58BT and the RT-AX68U. I love the design om the RT-AX68U and will fit in to most home environment. The PCE-AX58BT is a real worthwhile investment for people to take advantage of WIFI-6 and has older motherboards(or entry level boards). Installation is very easy and the user interface for the router is very user friendly.