NetGear Nighthawk X10 As A High-End Home Router

The Nighthawk X10 has been working out better than the ASUS AC3200 router I was previously using: the WiFi range is much better, the WiFi performance feels much snappier, and at peak times where there are the most number of devices on the network, I haven't run into any drops in connectivity or major slowdowns.

For some brief benchmarks of the Nighthawk X10, I ran some tests of the Nighthawk X10 compared to a ASUS RT-AC3200 and ASUS RT-N66U with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon used for testing was about 35 feet away from the three routers and separated by one interior wall. The iPerf/netperf tests were connecting to a system on the wired network while the X1 Carbon laptop was connected via 802.11ac.

The 2.4GHz numbers weren't too interesting and actually didn't work out too well for the X10, but if your devices support 5GHz, why even use it then? At 5GHz, the X10 results were stable and faster than the AC3200. There was also a lot of fluctuation in the results over WiFi with the AC-3200 and N66U while there was little variation in the X10 performance.

The Netperf results were also strong for the Nighthawk X10 at 5GHz while the 2.4GHz results were a wash with the other devices.

In testing the Netgear Nighthawk X10 since the end of February, I've been very happy with the results thus far. The main downside of the device is the price, which is steady at $449 USD from retailers like Amazon and NewEgg.