Customer Ratings & Reviews

This has very poor user interface. Avoid if you do any sort of networking.

it wasn't working as intended in my opinion but not a terrible product just dont need

Like others have said this router disconnects all the time and has trouble doing the one thing it was designed to do and that is provide wifi. Everything that makes this a gaming router has to be turn off to get some functionality of wifi to stay stable. I will never waste money on another Netgear product.

It sucks does not connect to router for internet for set up, had to connect threw the wifi router I have to connect the iPhone address to do set up so now I have 2 devices trying to run wifi and the router login webpage access doesnt work either plenty of bad reviews wish I would have searched first

I have owned numerous Netgear products and at first was very skeptical about all the poor reviews but they fit this product well. I used it for 1 week used the software to optimize my internet and gove my wired connection priority and still it throttled my internet down below that of a snail pace.

Powerful Wifi to use, but I didn't end up using it. Bestbuy failed to deliver me the Ghost of Tsushima Collector's Edition with some system error and telling the day before that they'll automatically cancel my pre-order which I pre-ordered long time ago

I bought an XR500 and its sucks. Constantly shuts down or loses internet. Call support, waited on the phone for an hour, transferred 3x and then they hung up. I own several Netgear products, but no more. Your products and service are garbage.

looks hot but my internet speeds didn't improve in my opinion

Note: This is a HIGHLY abridged version of my review, if you have questions, please feel free to ask. There has become a trend of manufacturers slapping the word ‘Gaming’ on a product, in order to increase appeal and price. Netgear hasn’t done this until now, so, needless to say, when I saw ‘Gaming Router’ slapped onto Netgear’s newest product offering, the XR500….. I sighed. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Netgear already has a pretty solid range of routers that operate extremely well for gaming, so what exactly can they offer up to make this new router a better product? My most recent ‘Go To’ router, is Netgear’s R7800 router. I picked it because it meets the needs of most of all of my clients, performs well, looks good, and it has, essentially the same footprint as the Netgear R7000 router. (Which was my previous ‘Go To’ router of choice) When I saw the RX500, I immediately thought it looked very much like the R7800, minus the fact that it has more of a futuristic sports-car look to it. Frankly, if this thing had a scrolling red LED at the front, reminiscent of K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider….That would have been the only way it would have caught my attention faster. (Netgear marketing clearly missed an opportunity here *chuckling*) Now, as with anything that emphasises style first, I find myself wondering: What if it performed poorly, but I was ‘ok’ with that, because it looked good?? Would that mean I’ve become my worst nightmare, a shallow consumer who cares more about ‘bling’ than anything else?!?! Luckily, I can safely say, we’ll never know the answer to these questions… because this router is pretty awesome. Anyone that has used a Netgear router in the last 5-6 years will tell you, that even when the routers perform well, the user interface is less than stellar, and the devices occasionally lack certain bells and whistles that power users have come to expect from other manufacturer’s devices. With this router, utilizing DumaOS, the user interface has been completely revamped, and looks, dare I say.. Modern?!? Do you want to know your current average latency? How about how many devices are connected to your network, and their current average network speed? These panels can be configured to display all of that and much more. They can ALSO be resized to fit your preferred layout. Out of the box, even if you don’t mess with any of the additional setting and options, the router performs as well if not better than the R7800. But where it really starts to shine, is when you go in and start tweaking the settings a little bit in the QoS panel. With other routers, often there’s just simply an ‘Enable QoS’ checkbox that’s supposed to fix latency and bandwidth problems with devices on your network. HOWEVER, those checkboxes aren’t very accurate, and they have no idea of what your maximum capacity on the entire line is. This router attempts to get around that, by performing a speed test on your connection, and setting that theoretical max, within the router itself. It gets to about 90% or so, so I’d recommend setting it to your proper speeds if it doesn’t get it right. While this is a slight issue that doesn’t really affect the overall review, it’s something that all users should be aware of, especially if you’re enabling QoS. Speaking of QoS, there are multiple avenues for adjusting and tweaking it on this router. You can have it determine QoS triggers on devices, IP addresses, or detected network traffic type. So, there’s another neat little feature, that allows you to sort of region lock yourself when gaming. See, sometimes the auto-matchmaking systems that developers put into place, simply don’t work as expected. A laggy connection is terrible to play on, already, and when you can’t even properly communicate with your team due to being connected to a server outside of your area, your gaming session can go from being fun, to no fun at all. This feature allows you to go into the router, and tell it you ONLY want to be connected with other servers within a certain radius. Now, there’s the other general run of the mill port triggering and port forwarding, and all of the other little things you’ve come to expect of a consumer class router, but with DumaOS, you get those previously mentioned QoS addons, the various adjustable display panels in the UI, and all of the ‘extras’ under the hood. Overall this router is fantastic. Downsides: 1.) This is the first iteration of Netgear utilizing DumaOS, so there is still of a bit of a disconnect between the usual Netgear settings, and the DumaOS ones. The full integration of the two doesn’t seem final. You’ll be spending time going from 1 configuration panel for the Netgear side of things, and then the other configuration panels for the DumaOS settings. This may frustrate some users. 2.) Network Monitor Issues - DumaOS has a feature built into it that has a network monitor functionality in it, but viewing this data can be a bit of a headache on a busy network, as the graph updates every 1 second, and so it makes it super hard to click on the desired device. But once you do, you can actively see what type of traffic is being consumed by a particular device. For SOME, this might be construed as an invasion of privacy. Now, just realize, you can’t actually view what is being viewed, just general types of traffic. This is even less severe than some might think, because (too) often, I saw a lot of ‘Unknown’ and ‘Uncategorized’ traffic indicators. This didn’t affect the performance, but the UI clearly didn’t know what it was looking at. 3.) Once again since this is the first gen of the DumaOS being bundled with a Netgear product, the documentation is lacking. Example on the QoS page: There is a sort of circular flower looking slider, where you can adjust performance based on devices connected to your network. Now, the question is, What setting is the better setting? Red or Green? 0 or 100? 4.) In the network Device Manager tab, if you have switches in place on your network, you can’t specify them as switches, nor indicate what devices are plugged into those switches. So, if you tell the router to block connectivity to that switch, and it has other devices plugged into it, it won’t necessarily let you know that you’re going to be blocking traffic for all of the devices plugged into that switch as well. So use the blocking feature with caution. 5.) In the Device Manager tab, nearly all of your device names aren’t detected. YET, when you go into the Netgear Tab, and go into the LAN address reservations (for assigning IPs based on MAC address) you will see the names of your devices.. Those SAME devices that the Device Manager can’t recognize. 6.) Also on the Device Manager tab: devices are listed as offline, when clearly they’re not. (mine currently shows a large number of devices offline, that aren’t) Perhaps my issue is that I have too many (62) devices operating on this router, I don’t know. Your mileage may vary, here. 7.) On the main dashboard, you’re going to find a list of ‘Installed R-Apps’, which I assume are a listing of applications that are integrated into the device. There are clearly options to enable and disable different R-Apps. Or, at least, there WOULD be, if the buttons actually worked. For the above mentioned reasons alone, I find the DumaOS portion of this router a bit ‘half baked’ as it were. I imagine it’ll be more polished as the device matures. Now, even considering all of the little quirks and issues above, I absolutely love this device. Other than 1 weird little issue with the UI not refreshing properly (not 100% convinced it wasn’t something with the laptop I was using at the time), I’ve had no major issues with the device. That said, fully understand, when I get a new device, to make sure it’ll withstand any sort of situation my clients might put it in, I’m actually rather brutal on the first encounter with devices. This unit has been placed in both a 50F environment, and a 90F+ environment and has performed flawlessly, and has more than exceeded my expectations for a new model of router. The original concerns with the whole ‘Gaming’ aspect being appended to the router isn’t entirely gone, because of the stigma associated with it….. But I will openly say, this is a high performance router, that should meet any realistic demand you throw at it. Biggest gripe:Netgear and other manufacturers: Stop being lazy, and putting paper labels on these devices. Prominently on top of the router, is a paper sticker that has the default SSID and password for the router. By the way, they have both of those items on the label on the bottom, too. Why it’s necessary for both spots, I honestly don’t know. You know what, fine, put a decal in both spots, because apparently it’s too much work to flip the router upside down and look for the SSID/Password, which most people are going to change anyway But, for the love of everything, STOP MAKING IT OUT OF PAPER. Manufactures: If you insist on using a label there, use a vinyl label. Yes, it will likely cost you half a cent more per label. But, you know what? I’ll happily pay a full 1 cent more to have that label easy to remove, so I can place it somewhere more secure, if I decide to use the same password and SSID. Or, better yet, do like you’ve done in the past, use a piece of plastic wrap to stick it on there, so people can remove it easily. Yes, that’s my biggest complaint. I know, I’m odd. For the MSRP of $300, this router is an amazing product. I’m sure I’ll be purchasing multiple units, momentarily, as my clients start their upgrade processes this year :) Disclaimer: I received this product as part of Netgear’s First Look Review program, which allows users of Netgear’s products to receive review products in exchange for critical and unbiased reviews.

I bought this product. Spent almost 2 weeks trying to get it to work. Only to find out because I have Comcast, it won't work because of the lines that Comcast uses. Sucks for me. Hopefully, NetGear makes it compatible in the future with all internet networks.

we couldn't keep our phones or laptop connected to wi-fi when using this router. called Netgear customer support, only very senior techs could walk us through the issue. ultimately didn't fix it. had to return it.

I have been running this router for about a week. Last weekend I hosted a Call of Duty party at my house and everyone couldn’t the performance of it. The gameplay was super smooth without any lag (<10ms ping)! We played for about 4 hours straight and never had any issue – I can’t say definitively it was the router that caused us to win more, but we won much more games than we did on my old gaming router (Linksys WRT32X). Best features: • DumaOS : If you are a gamer and not using a router with the DumaOS its comparable to buying a 4K system and trying to play on a CRT TV. I tried the NetDuma gaming router in the past but got rid of it due to it being a single band. DumaOS makes exactly what you are looking for as a gamer – I love the idea of this partnership between Netgear and Duma • Geo-Filter: This is another must have, I hate with Xbox live pairs me us with host nowhere near me. Setting the Geo-Filter was giving me <10ms ping speeds!!! • Network Monitor and QOS : I love being able to see what is being a network hog on system and set the QOS to throttle them down! NEATGEAR supplied me the XR500 GAMING ROUTER free of charge; however I would have probably bought this router anyway for the NetDumaOS.

I will never buy another Netgear anything in my life. They have the worst products, especially their routers, and their customer service is non-existent.

I like the layout, settings cause poor internet. Settings for port forward cause all types of issues. Even after hours or Netgear tech support conversations. Frustrating.

Not only were the ethernet ports labeled backward (turns out this was an issue with some of first run) , but my laptop plugged directly in did not work.

It's not worth the money you spent for it. First it was working good. Once I updated the firmware it's worthless piece of junk. I am returning it.

Hook it up properly, and 2 ppl still can’t be on the on the Internet. So it was point less! I will be returning this item this weekend.

It didn’t work for me I tried everything from forums to support as in why this device would block my discord on my pc

Bought one, spent over 4 hours with Netgear support and A.T.T. No one can get this router to connect to the internet

Router fails to turn on and became non-functional. Waste of money do avoid this router.