ASUS Router 4200mb RT-AX59U AX4200 AiMesh

Product Information

Honestly, the AX3000 WIFI performance isn’t up to par considering the price range and brand new model. My old RT-AC58U has great range and stability, the AX3000 WIFI performance (range) was a huge disappointment. I expected it to have better range, I guessed that is what happened when we buy a router…..”We can’t tell until when we used it”. I just hope that ASUS will continue to upgrade the firmware to improve the WIFI speed and stability of the AX3000.

Two things that I find comfort in the AX3000 router….. 1) AIMESH and 2)AIprotection. I placed those feature as important as the WIFI performance. Since this is my first AX router to test, let’s have a look at some of the WiFi 6 features that the Asus RT-AX58U can use. First, there’s the OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) which is one of the most important improvements over the last WiFi generation and its role is to divide a channel into multiple smaller sub-channels that gets shared with up to 30 devices at the same time, so less bandwidth is wasted (the previous implementation gave each client its own entire channel and other devices had to wait their turn until the client transmission was completed) – it’s important to know that OFDMA works both downstream and upstream. If there’s one issue with Wi-Fi routers and mesh systems, it’s that they’re often big, ugly and hard to place. As I’ve hinted at, the TR-AX59U’s nearest rival is its older stablemate, the RT-AX82U. The two routers performed similarly at close range but the RT-AX82U managed to keep up higher speeds as I moved further away. That probably has much to do with the bigger antenna array of the RT-AX82U, and its 4×4 MIMO support surely doesn’t hurt either.

RT-AX86 Series (RT-AX86U/RT-AX86S)

My older router was the RT-AC58U, I used it for about 3 years, had better range than the AX3000. I had to changed it because it had problems connecting WIFIs for video conferencing, chatting and video streaming; the range was good but it was not able to connect to more than 12 devices simultaneously.

Note: The RT-AX58U is advertised as an AX3000-class router, so, it features a maximum theoretical data transfer rate of 574 Mbps on the 2.4GHz radio band and a maximum theoretical data transfer rate of 2,402 Mbps on the 5GHz radio. That combination of strong performance and competitive price makes the Asus RT-AX59U a good all-around upgrade for anyone that’s still plodding away with an ageing Wi-Fi 5 router. This means that at its 8.8 x 5.0 x 6.3 inches, the RT-AX58U (RT-AX3000) occupies far less space than the RT-AX88U, but, despite being smaller, it still has a larger footprint than the Asus RT-AC86U (or the RT-AC68U). Well, the latter does sit vertically, so it doesn’t require much space from your desk, but the RT-AX58U does has the advantage of being able to be mounted on the wall or the ceiling. That’s right, on the bottom of the device, there are two mounting holes, so you’re not forced to keep the router on the table and that’s very useful especially in an office. To test the performance of the RT-AX59U, I installed the router in the study of my own home, using default settings for internet access and Wi-Fi. I hooked up an Asustor Drivestor 4 Pro NAS appliance to one of the LAN ports and connected to the 5GHz wireless network from a test laptop equipped with a 2×2 Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E network card. There have been discussions that the RT-AX58U was equipped with an Intel Lantiq GRX350 CPU (like the NETGEAR RAX40) which would cancel the possibility of it being supported by Merlin, but, since it’s now confirmed that the router is Broadcom-based, it should receive the Merlin custom firmware at some point this year.

There are two USB ports at the rear, too. One USB 2.0 and one faster USB 3.0. These can be used for sharing printers or storage, if needed. The app includes plenty of other useful features too, including the ability to create a temporary guest network, and use QoS - quality of service - to prioritise certain types of online services, such as streaming video or gaming, that really need top performance. Thank you for your second review of the AX3000. You were right about disabling the 802.11ax/WIFI6 mode, my 2.4G improved quite a bit, but still lagging (read below). Your WIFI performance rating, was higher on the first review, the first review got an 8/10. The second review, it dropped by 1 point….. but I think the WIFI performance for the AX3000 should be around 5 or 6 over 10. UPDATE 03.22.2020: The Asus RT-AX58U may have definitely has a compatibility issue with the PCE-AC88 and the PCE-AC68, so I would wait a bit until Asus releases a fix. The AX3000 did not have any issues connecting 15 or more devices for video conferencing, chatting and video streamings, however, majority of the devices were connected to 5Gs, 2.4Gs; was pathetic, the range of 2.4G cannot even cover my 100sqm home. The far end corner of the master bed (which is about 30+ft away and 2 concrete walls from the router) I could only get 1-2 bar (between -70 to -60dBm) & most of the time it got disconnected, whereas the 5Gs connection got (about -40 to -50dBm) and never had problems of disconnection. Not sure why the 2.4Gs range is worse than 5Gs, it was worst previously before disabling the 802.11ax.