Asus RT-N66U “Dark Knight” Router review

 

If you’re looking for a dual-band router with great broadband speeds, very large signal range, simple setup and cloud storage then look no further because the Asus RT-N66U is one of the best routers that meets all these requirements and more.
Although its price isn’t very high, this router performs very well and offers a lot of premium features.

Note: The RT-N66U supports three 150Mbs data streams simultaneously.

Design
The exterior is stylish, well built, with a black carbon-fibre feel on top of the case and an array of LED lights for router connection status. It indeed reminds us of the featured designs in the “Dark Knight” movie .
The RT-N66U has 3 removable antennas that somehow felt a bit out of place if following the style of the router but they do help boosting the signal coverage.
To be able to keep a clean, minimalist design in the front of the router all ports and buttons have been moved on the back. So, on the back side we find four yellow Gigabit Ethernet ports (for a wired network), two 2.0 USB ports, a WPS button, a power button, a tiny power port, a WAN port and a reset button.

Note: The USb ports can be used for printers (using EZ Printer utility), external hard-drives or for plugging a 3G modem, if the main WAN port would go down.
By the nature of its design, this router should be able to fit anywhere on your furniture without standing out a lot and, while I prefer to keep it standing on its four rubber feet, you can put it in a vertical position or wall mount it.

Performance and Connectivity
Asus RT-N66U features a 600MHz Broadcom BCM 4706 CPU, backed by 256 MB RAM and a 32 MB Flash Memory. All this specs are designed to give stellar dual-band (2.4 and 5GHz) wireless capabilities and to provide Gigabit Ethernet performance.
We tested this router on both 2.4 and 5GHz (at 20 and 40 MHz) and the results were pretty good, with up to 25% better performance than it’s competitors on read/write and streaming Full HD movies.

Note: The RT-N66U is backwards compatible with any wireless devices using a/b/g signals.
This router manages 3D FullHD video streaming, while surfing the web or downloading without breaking a sweat and the signal remained strong when transferring large files even after two concrete walls.

On 2.4GHz and 10 feet we measured data transfer speed of 160Mbs, at 40 feet a speed of 110Mbs and at last, at 80 feet we measured 45Mbs. Similarly, on 5GHz and 10 feet away, we got 145Mbs data transfer speed, at 40 feet a speed of 70Mbs and at 80 feet the data transfer speed was 15Mbs.

Setup
Setting up the Asus RT-N66U was easy and quick and we were able to surf the internet in no time. The Asus N66U interface is well organized and intuitive.

Worth mentioning is the VPN that features a MPPE encryption and assures a confidential and secure data transmission, Port forwarding, that is needed if hosting a service behind a NAT router, the DMZ that, similar to port forwarding and NAT, allows you to forward traffic to a single device (suitable for games).
Note: The Asus RT-N66U supports up to 300000 data sessions.

In terms of security, the RT-N66U offers a good firewall package with SPI intrusion detection and DoS protection. For encryption we have 64-bit WEP, 128-bit WEP, WPA2-PSK, WPA-PSK, WPA-enterprise, WPA2-enterprise and WPS support.
Also, this router has a parental control option that allows parents to filter the web access for their children.

Another great option for users who have a lot of devices connected and not a very fast internet is the QoS feature that helps you prioritize any task in terms of bandwidth consumption.
If you want to stream, synch or share your music or video files on the go then you can use the AiCloud. This app links your Asus cloud to iOS and Android.
Note: The Asus RT-N66U “Black Knight” can be upgraded to dd-wrt for better performance and broader configuration.

In terms of performance and coverage, the Asus RT-N66U is one of the fastest and stable routers we have tested. With a classy design, easy to configure software and a reasonable price, this router is a must have.

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