Asus gives its gaming router a quad-band boost at CES 2022
With four bands of traffic and full support for Wi-Fi 6E, the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 is the company's most powerful gaming router yet.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
The Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 (left) and GT-AX11000 Pro,
Asus is using CES 2022 to launch the latest additions to its lineup of high-powered ROG Rapture gaming routers, including the first-ever quad-band gaming router with four separate bands of traffic.
That new flagship is the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000, and it builds on last year's addition of Wi-Fi 6E support by adding a second 5GHz band into the mix. Both 5GHz bands and the 6E-exclusive 6GHz band offer top transfer rates of up to 4.8Gbps, while the 2.4GHz band promises top theoretical speeds as high as 1,148Mbps (1.148Gbps). The router runs on Broadcom Wi-Fi 6 chipsets and a 2.0GHz, 64-bit quad-core CPU, a step up from last year's 1.8GHz CPU. Other improvements are a matching set of two Ethernet LAN ports capable of accepting incoming wired speeds of up to 10Gbps, plus a 2.5Gbps WAN port and four additional gigabit LAN ports.
As for features, you can expect the usual barrage of tricks intended to eliminate gaming lag, including game-specific server guidance, "triple-level game acceleration" and a new Asus RangeBoost Plus feature that promises to deliver better Wi-Fi coverage throughout your home. And, yep, you can customize the router's RGB lighting effects, too.
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Just don't plan on any of that coming cheap -- Asus expects to start selling the ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 worldwide for $649 starting sometime in the first quarter of the year.
Sometime after that in Q2, expect the arrival of another addition to the ROG Rapture line, the GT-AX11000 Pro. With the same spidery design, the same top speeds on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and the same 2.0GHz processor powering things on the inside, it's essentially the GT-AXE16000 but stripping out the Wi-Fi 6E support and the 6GHz band to help bring the price down to $499.
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Also missing from the mix: those 10Gbps LAN jacks -- instead, you get a pair of 2.5Gbs ports that you can aggregate together for a double-wired 5Gbps connection.
We'll plan on testing both models out once they hit the market to see how they perform in practice, so expect us to report back once we have more to share.