Netgear Nighthawk RAX200

Pricey Networking Supremacy

- ZAK STOREY

OK, SO IT MIGHT mildly resemble Emperor Palpatine’s personal shuttle (the Lambda-class T-4a, not the Sentinel-class, that thing sucked), but Netgear’s Nighthawk RAX200 is an absolute monster in the world of personal networking. Staying with the Star Wars analogies, it’s like the Empire took the Deathstar, merged it with an Imperial Class Star Destroyer, and then condensed it all down into something the size of a Millenium Falcon.

And boy, is it expensive. Yep, this thing is $500 of routing nuttiness that leaves us with mixed emotions. First, let’s start with the positives. It’s a WiFi 6, tri-band router, complete with 12 streams, 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, Multi-gig internet ports (via link aggregation), VPN support, eight WiFi antennas, beamforming and MiMO as standard, 2x USB 3.0 ports, a quad-core 1.8GHz processor, 882MB of usable RAM, 512MB of flash storage, a surprisingly potent cooling fan, and enough additional features to make you weep (although some of those are locked behind paywalls). There’s a lot here, in fact, we could spend the rest of this review ticking off the feature list.

As far as performance goes, it’s impeccable too. Compared to our test unit (the Asus RT AX88U), Ethernet performance was on par, tapping out with an impressive 149.82Mb/s down, and 19.23Mb/s up, slightly higher than the RT AX88U’s 147.32Mb/s down, and 18.15Mb/s up on the day. And in the WiFi testing, using WiFi 6 on a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, one floor up, and an identical server choice on speedtest.net, the RAX200 managed 128Mb/s down and 18.0 Mb/s up, well within the margin of error compared with the AX88U’s 129Mb/s down and 18.1Mb/s up. A marked improvement in comparison to the AX5400 WiFi 6 router we reviewed in the previous issue.