In layman’s terms, routers supporting MU-MIMO serve traffic to multiple devices concurrently (at the same time) while routers without MU-MIMO send and receive traffic to one device at a time. Not all Netgear router models support MU-MIMO as you can see from the comparison table above, however most of them do. MU-MIMO stands for Multi- User Multiple Input Multiple Output. The other models have the antenna amplifier inside the router motherboard. This type of antenna has an active WiFi amplifier inside the antenna itself (at the top of the antenna precisely) in order to boost signal even further and avoid interference and signal loss.
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Moreover, the X10 is the only one using Active Antennas. This is especially useful if you live in a wireless crowded area and you get a lot of interference from neighbors etc. These special channels are allocated for Radar use and are not used by other WiFi routers, therefore interference is minimized on your own router at the 5Ghz band. Two models (the X4S and X10) support also DFS channels (Dynamic Frequency Selection) which allows the router to use some special frequency channels in the 5Ghz band in order to avoid interference. The Nighthawk line is equipped with high-power amplified external antennas (ranging from 3 to 6 antennas) that’s why they can cover large homes with ease. Their CPUs include the popular Broadcom chipsets and also the Qualcomm IPQ8065 on the R7800. Starting with the dual-core 1Ghz CPU of the R7000 model and ending with the Quad-core 1.7Ghz CPU of the high-end X10 R9000, the Nighthawk devices are among the most powerful wireless routers in the market. You can just copy the document both locally on the laptop and save also a copy to the shared backup USB drive over the network. Imagine being on your laptop working on an important document.
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Moreover, you can have a hard disk with large storage connected to this USB port and serving as the backup storage for the whole family.
NETGEAR R8500 REVIEW FULL
All models have two USB ports (either USB2.0 or USB3.0) meaning that you can connect a USB hard drive full of content (photos, videos, documents etc) ready to be shared across the whole WiFi network in the home. This is another excellent hardware feature which is available on Nighthawk routers. This will create a bundle port with 2 Gbps bandwidth capacity which is needed for fast 4K HD video streaming from a locally attached storage device. The flagship X10 R9000 router has 6 gigabit ports and you can use 2 of them for Link Aggregation. So yes, having several LAN wired ports is very useful.Īll Nighthawk routers are equipped with at least 4 LAN Gigabit Ethernet ports (10/100/1000 Mbps) offering therefore plenty of ports for gigabit wired connections. To these wired ports you can connect for example your smart TV, a network printer, a game console, a desktop workstation computer which does not have wireless card etc.
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Although we are talking about wireless routers here (most user devices will be connected via WiFi), it’s important to have plenty of wired LAN ports as well. LAN Ethernet Ports ConnectivityĪnother important hardware aspect you need to consider is the wired port options available. Moreover, the fastest X10 (R9000) router is using also the high-performance 802.11AD standard which is the only one supporting multi-gigabit wireless speeds nowadays (at shorter ranges). WiFi Standards SupportedĪll Nighthawk models are using the newest WiFi 802.11AC standard (with a minimum of dual-band AC1900 speed found on the R7000 device and maximum AC4000 and AD7200 found on the high-end devices).
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PLEX Media Server, Security, Parental Controls, Remote access of files on USB storage, Backup, OpenVPN, Kwiltīefore starting to discuss each model individually, let’s first see the most important features and technical specs included in (almost) all models that make the Nighthawk product line a best-buy option for home and office networks. Security, Parental Controls, Remote access of files on USB storage, Backup, OpenVPN, Kwilt Security, Parental Controls, Remote access of files on USB storage, Backup NETGEAR Armor – Advanced Security Protection