ASUS - ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro BE30000 Quad-Band Wi-Fi 7 Gaming Router - Black

Lets address the elephant in the room first. It is very pricey and i would heavily suggest wait until it goes on sale, or if it's on sale somewhere else ask to have it price matched, assuming its a qualified conpetitor for price matching. That being said this router is a beast. Speeds are excellent and coverage is broad. Like most homes the best coverage will come from the router being located mainly in the middle of the house and not stuffed in a far corner. If you cant install it in a central location then i would consider looking into one of their AI Mesh routers to extend the network. The additional gamer first features are a nice touch and if you have an Asus motherboard on your computer you can take further advantage of the game first feature. The website interface can be a bit intimidating, but offers a large variety of optimizations including gaming, video streaming, video conferencing, office work, file transfering and more. I know in the title of this review i said "when it works." My isp is ATT Fiber and i believe my issue is due to a configuration issue between the modem and the router. What was happening was the wifi on all devices would say its connected without internet, but the status lights on the router would should its functioning like normal. This would result in my needing to reboot the system which can take up to five minutes. This would happen about once a week and was getting super annoying to the point i considered returning the router. So far what i have found that seems to be working now is the following: On the ATT modem, set it to IP Passthrough, turn off all firewall settings, disable all packet filtering, turn off IPV6 On the Asus router, make sure your firewall is enabled on default settings, keep IPV6 turned off, under WAN settings the WAN Connection Type is set to Automatic IP and at the bottom the DHCP query frequency is set to Normal Mode. This seems to be the most stable setup that i have been able to find, and doing a good amount of research i found that the no internet issue is a common problem for this particular model. Asus needs to address this with a firmware update for a more permanent fix. All in all if you're tech savy enough to set it up correctly and are comfortable with potential troubleshooting then you'll be happy with this router once its set up and running correctly.

I picked up the ROG GTBE98 at Best Buy last week and wow its been solid right out the box. Setup took like 10 minutes with the app no fuss at all just followed the steps and boom everything connected perfect. My downloads are way faster now huge game files finish in no time and online matches feel super smooth no lag spikes even with the whole house streaming stuff. The gaming ports and boost features really do their thing my ping dropped a ton. Looks pretty slick too with the lights and all that. Had a tiny hiccup with one device at first but a quick reboot fixed it. Overall super happy I went with this one over the cheaper options definitely worth it for anyone who games alot or wants fast reliable wifi. Would buy again no doubt.

Calling anything “gaming” is a poisonous marketing term and the LEDs are silly. …however: I appreciate the open top. I nerded on that for sure. The specs are substantial. Since I had already planned on my 10G backbone, this router fit the bill perfectly. Why? The dual WAN failover. I have 2 separate ISPs. Each are giving me 2Gbps. Overkill? Absolutely. …but I have heard my XGS-PON fiber might be seeing 5Gbps soon. I don’t appreciate the price especially with much more capable devices out there, but I’ve been happy with ASUSWRT and I can still put Merlin on it if necessary (my config has a single script to open the secondary WAN, nothing weird).

As a longtime fan of the ASUSWRT ecosystem, I’ve got to say this slab of silicon is an absolute beast. Most consumer routers feel like toys, but this is a legitimate networking powerhouse that feels like it’s running on a customized, open-source-inspired backbone. It’s physically massive—basically a small workstation—but it has the transmit power to blanket a high-interference environment without breaking a sweat. We’re finally seeing the 802.11be (WiFi 7) transition, and this unit is the ultimate future-proofing play. The implementation of Guest Network Pro is the real killer feature here. It provides granular VLAN tagging and network segregation right out of the box. Being able to isolate "chatty" IoT devices or a dedicated WFH tunnel on their own SSIDs—completely firewalled from the primary intranet—is a dream for anyone serious about their security posture. For those comparing this to their other WiFi 7 offerings, the differentiator is the Quad-Band architecture versus the standard Tri-Band. If you’re planning a wireless backhaul for an AiMesh topology, that fourth band is crucial—it prevents the dreaded throughput halving by dedicating a 6GHz or high-5GHz channel strictly for node-to-node communication. The fact that Asus maintains backward compatibility for any of their routers to act as a mesh node makes it the most flexible ecosystem for power users. If you need raw throughput, robust L2 isolation, and a quad-band radio stack, this is the gold standard. Are you planning to utilize the 10GbE ports for a high-speed NAS or a multi-gig fiber ONT? (This helps determine if your wired backbone can actually keep up with those WiFi 7 speeds).

Wi-Fi 7 being the new standard is something else. Since wifi 6 was not going well I finally upgraded. Now Wi-Fi speeds are stable and I am getting what I am paying for. It can even reach into the room that normally the signal strength is pretty weak. Gaming has also improved since the direct link from AT&T‘s modem wasn’t doing too well in competitive games. So I say if you can afford it go for it. So worth it especially if it’s on sale.