NETGEAR Nighthawk XR1000 Pro Gaming

Gaming firmware and futuristic design

NETGEAR Nighthawk XR1000 Pro Gaming is an interesting gaming router from the Nighthawk series with firmware adapted for gamers. According to the passport, it supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard, can work in two frequency bands and provides a throughput of up to 5.4 Gbps. The 2.4 GHz band operates in 2x2 MIMO mode, the faster 5 GHz band supports 4x4 MIMO. Wired connection is limited to 1 Gbps, there is one incoming WAN port, four LAN ports. The functional set of Nighthawk is quite sophisticated and modern: there is a MAC address filter, a pumped firewall, automatic DumaOS firmware updates and support for various operating modes (FTP server, printer, DLNA, etc.). Naturally, all current wireless signal enhancement technologies, data packet distribution and traffic prioritization are supported, including MU-MIMO, OFDMA, Beamforming and QoS.

High-quality and stable connection

In the Nighthawk XR1000 Pro Gaming tests, the Nighthawk AX5400 Pro Gaming performed quite well. Bandwidth will be sufficient for most users, the antennas are quite confident to break through several walls, and the hardware platform is able to serve an impressive number of connected devices without any problems. And indeed this is an important factor, since when choosing a router, most people pay attention to the overall speed, support for different Wi-Fi standards and some additional things, completely ignoring the stuffing, which largely determines how high quality home network coverage will turn out.

DumaOS

In addition, NETGEAR is ready to surprise with a bunch of unique features implemented after the global update of the DumaOS gaming firmware in 2021. For example, in the web interface there is a tab with a heat map of game servers, which highlights the quality of the connection to each of them. Thus, the player can quickly find a suitable option and not suffer from high ping or a dropped connection. The updated QoS mechanism allows you to prioritize traffic by type of application, rather than connected clients. Otherwise, DumaOS offers all the usual settings, including DNS, LAN, WLAN and guest network, as well as VPN, IPv6, VLAN and IPTV services. At the same time, this is far from the most functional router, which may turn some users away. For example, a wired connection in it is limited to 1 Gb / s, there are only 4 antennas, plus there is no support for mesh networks. Competitors do not sleep and in recent years have been taught that for a $400 router this is far from a luxury.