Netgear Nighthawk RAX200
OK, SO IT MIGHT mildly resemble Emperor Palpatine’s personal shuttle (the Lambdaclass 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.