The Netgear Nighthawk X6 (or R8000) is the first Tri-Band Wi-Fi router that I have ever used, and after a couple of months of using it, I found the router to much more advanced than anything I've used before.
Features and Design: First off, the design of the Nighthawk X6 looks similar to something you might find in the Batcave. The aggressive design looks fantastic, and it comes packed to the brim with features. The Nighthawk X6 puts on quite a show, with dual-color LEDs reporting the status of power, Internet connectivity, its three Wi-Fi networks, its two USB port connections, and its Ethernet connections. Buttons on top of the router enable WPS and toggle the Wi-Fi radios off and on, to help save power if you're going away for a while. Netgear packed this router with all the features you’d expect to find in a high-end model, but it’s unprecedented in using six MIMO antennas. The antennas themselves are well crafted, but they aren't that durable. If you have kids or pets in the house, make sure to prop the router up at a higher location. The router itself can either lay flat on a horizontal surface or you can mount it to a wall. It relies on an inline power supply that’s bigger than what comes with many laptops. There’s one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port on its back panel, so it can share both a printer and a storage device on your network. Netgear’s ReadyShare technology makes it easy to map an attached hard drive to Windows, and the company’s ReadyShare Vault software lets you establish an automatic back-up schedule for your client PCs. DLNA and iTunes servers make it easy to stream music, photos, and video to client devices inside your home. And Netgear supports cloud-based parental controls, if you're so inclined.
Quality and Performance:
Netgear describes it as a “tri-band” router, which is not entirely true. It still operates on only two frequency bands—2.4- and 5GHz—just like its high-end competitors, but this router is unique in that it has three Wi-Fi radios to support three independent wireless networks. Out of the box, it uses one SSID for its 2.4GHz network (for 802.11b/g/n clients) and one SSID for both of its 5GHz networks (for 802.11a/n/ac clients). In order to avoid having the two networks step on each other, the Nighthawk X6 bonds two channels at the lower end of the 5GHz spectrum and two channels at the higher end (the higher channels deliver more power). When you begin connecting wireless clients to the common SSID, the router automatically assigns each client to the most appropriate network. Netgear’s Smart Connect feature first determines if the router needs to perform any load balancing. If the number of existing clients on each network is greater than three, the router will connect the next new client to whichever network has the fewest leeches. The router also evaluates each client’s signal strength, pairing clients with weak signals to the high-power channels and clients with strong signals to the low-power channels. If Smart Connect determines that load balancing isn’t necessary, the router automatically assigns 802.11ac and 3x3 802.11n devices at short range to the low-power channels and any 5GHz devices at long range to the high-power channels. The Nighthawk X6 delivers throughput up to 1.3Gbps with 3x3 clients on each of its 5GHz networks, and it supports 256 QAM encoding on the 2.4GHz frequency band to deliver throughput up to 600Mbps with 3x3 clients that support 256 QAM. If you have a house or apartment packed with wireless signals, the X6 definitely has the brain power to handle each wireless connection.
Final Thoughts:
The Nighthawk X6 is the most expensive Wi-Fi router I’ve tested, and I feel that for the serious networking home, the router is a great candidate to consider. On the other hand, if you only have a couple of devices that need an internet connection, then the X6 is pretty much overkill.
+Very speedy, even with multiple devices
+Long list of networking and media-streaming features +Premium design and finish -Very Expensive S&S Rating: 8.5/10 @whatsPlay
