Customer Ratings & Reviews

For a high-end router should not fail right away as it did

wifi signal is not good even for a small room. I have to go back to an Apple router

This thing was supposed to be plug and play its not and I've been a IT specialist for a few years.

i had better not very good would not recommend and i usually like netgear

This is my review of the NETGEAR Nighthawk Pro Gaming Router (XR500) To start, I have to say I can’t believe how easy it was to get this device up and running. Plug in and connect to it’s WiFi and launch the admin, have it easily walk you through a few changes, mainly just to ensure it is secure, then you are ready to go. If you are buying this to enhance your gaming or network quality then you definitely want to go to the DumaOS dashboard page. This is where you have the capability to control what seems like every aspect of your network and ensure you have the best possible gaming experience. The DumaOS dashboard visually presents the data making it easy to quickly understand the status of your network. The default setup presents the most-likely used data so you don’t have to poke around just to see what you need. This is where the hardest part of the review happened for me. We made a few configuration settings to enhance the gaming experience and ended up getting sucked into game play for hours! It was awesome! The living situation here is there are four young adults who are constantly maxing out our bandwidth, mostly with gaming and video streaming. Our biggest issue is when we are trying to play games and the other roommates are watching videos. We would experience a lot of lag and other issues that were very frustrating to deal with. Once we started using this router those issues went completely away, so much so that it was too good to stop playing and start writing the review. In fact, that was how it went every time we changed settings or did other tests; Make a change, start the test, and play for hours. It has been almost impossible to actually get this review finished! I have used several different Netgear routers and although I like the interface they use they don’t hold a candle to the DumaOS interface. I really like how the interface is set up and looks but the capability makes us unstoppable in game play! We are killing it now and having so much fun! Both PC and the console games have really benefitted from having this router. When it comes to the WiFi strength, this device has that covered too. We are now getting a strong signal in what used to be the weakest areas of the house. Even in our detached garage we now have a strong and very usable signal. We often have friends over and we use the garage as a gathering space. Having strong WiFi out there has really been nice. Speaking of our guests, we have set up a guest network and now we don’t have to share our main credentials, something we never did before. All in all this router has been an amazing upgrade to our home network and we are all loving the upgrade. Now, back to the games! I do need to mention that I am a part of a beta review program and have been provided with a Nighthawk Pro Gaming Router (XR500) for review purposes. With that said this has been my honest opinion of the product and corresponding software.

The Netgear XR500 wireless gaming router is a beast of a network device. Size: The size of this router is quite substantial. It takes up about twice the real estate of my old Asus RTAC66U. This wasn’t an issue for me, however, as I had plenty of room on my shelf for the router. Also, make sure you have enough room to place the antennas in the proper configuration. Installation: The router was an overall easy installation. I did have an issue with one of the side antenna. The nut actually threads inside of the plastic case. I was afraid that I had cross threaded the nut on my first attempt. I had to unscrew and retry a couple of times before I finally got it to seat properly. All of the other connections went in without a hitch. Software: This software can be a little daunting at first. Setting up the LAN, WAN, and wireless settings was painless but figuring out how to add specific details to my main dashboard took some doing. It was not as intuitive as I thought it would be. Once the dashboard is set up though, you get a look at a lot of useful information quickly. You can get a live look at the speeds going through the router and can see how much each device is using. The device list is set up like a tree diagram so it’s very easy to tell which devices are connected to the ethernet ports, 2.4 gHz, and 5 gHz channels. The one issue I did have while setting up the router dealt with band steering. I tried to turn this feature on, but my devices would drop the connection every couple of minutes. This became a huge problem while trying to stream. I’m not going to let this issue reflect my overall rating of the router because it may be an issue with my devices or the way I have everything configured. I’ll have to keep toying with the settings to hopefully get this to work properly. One other nice feature is that you can have all of the LEDs on the router blink from activity, you can make them stay solid, or you can turn them off completely. This is handy depending on which room you have the router in. Performance: Like I said, this router is a beast. I’ve had multiple streaming devices running at the same time as running a game on my Xbox One. This thing didn’t even break a sweat. In fact, I ran into very few buffering issues on the streaming devices whereas it was a constant occurrence with my last router. It’s also nice that you can give certain devices priority over others in order to keep the buffering/lag to a minimum. The wireless download/upload speeds also had a significant jump over the previous router. Pros: Feels sturdy and durable Easy installation/setup (except for main dashboard) Speed, speed, speed Feature rich Minimal to no lag/buffer Cons: A little bulky Have to be careful when installing side antennas Main dashboard can be tough to figure out This is my unbiased opinion even though I received the device as part of the Netgear First Look Review Program.

Didn’t notice a big enough difference to justify spending that much on it

Design is good but it stoped working after 4 month.

6 months later and it is dead. Three hundred dollars down the drain.

Constantly drops data, WiFi strength isn’t so strong

Easy to set-up, took only a few minutes to set-up and within 5 minutes I was able to set-up and start using.Power-on the router and open a web browser and log into the router. The intuitive web interface guides you through the set-up process, it was a breeze to set-up. The router includes a rich set of features that are amazingly easy to set-up and use. My favorite feature is the dashboard. It is customizable and you can set-up the dash board to view the feature that are most important to you such as bandwidth consumption by various devices in your network. You can also choose to allocate maximum bandwidth to each device (QoS feature). You can prioritize the traffic for your gaming console so that you can take advantage of the maximum bandwidth for playing games. You can also set-up ping to check the latency times. PROS: Great signal strength across our entire house (3000 sq. ft) The BEST UI Easy to use Tons of features Advanced network monitoring CONS: Pricey (although I doubt you will find a better router in this price range) Lack of mobile device for set-up This router is suited for both techies as well as non-techies. I highly recommend this router.

More filters, more walls, more dropped connections.

This router is by far the best router I've owed, and I've owned and tried multiple. I have been skimmping on routers for two long. This XR500 is pricey but worth every penny. It is feature packed, design is awesome. Slap some rims and tires on it and you have a Ferrari. The range is nuts. I have a detached garage and I am able to connect wirelessly no problem, no drops in signal. Our setup at home are an Xbox One a PS4 and a plethora of devices from wireless tablets to HTPC'S and a server for media. This router does a great job connecting everything with no issues. Stream 4k, HD movies effortlessly. Now to the features, love the DumasOS, the Geo-Filter I see can make a difference in gaming, but in my use I do not see a benefit, I mainly play Gears of war 4 on Xbox One which is on a server, It does a good job connecting to a close server but unfortunately we cannot control who connects to the server, so I'm stuck playing with players with high pings. The feature that works well is the QOS setting. You can limit bandwidth to bandwidth hungry devices in your home. In my case I can bump up bandwidth usage for Xbox One. This has actually helped me with lag as well. So is this router worth it, I would say yes. It's a bit high on price but we pay for high bandwidth why not not get a Ferrari of a router to help enjoy our pricey bandwidth.

This thing is awesome. It's similar to the R7800 HW spec wise but looks way cooler AND the firmware is 100% different and way nicer features. It's done via another company they partnered with. It has a TON of awesome features SPECIFICALLY for gamers. I checked out the other companies website and they have a forum and are VERY active on it at replying to users asking question and making suggestions about improvements. I'm excited personally. We all know sometimes OEM firmwares aren't the most feature rich so it's nice to see a partnership where another vendor can fill in the gaps. Performance wise it's been great. Full speeds via wired or wifi. No latency issues and been rock solid stable. I've had it running about a week now. First thing I always do with a new router is factory reset it, update the firmware, factory reset it again and go to town. These steps are NOT required I just do out of habit to help reduce risk of issues. Always make sure you're on latest firmwares too FWIW. They fix a lot of bugs etc. Sometimes they come on the latest though and you luck out. It is worth mentioning I did get this free via NETGEAR First Look Review Program. This does NOT impact my rating at all. They do NOT coach us in anyway. The program exist so that potential purchasers can see REAL reviews from ACTUAL users when a product is so new it has none really. It also lets them know of issues or areas of improvements they can get a jump start on! If this is in your budget or really close and you're in the market, GET IT!

This is ALMOST plug and play. I just upgraded to gig internet with xfinity and had issues with my previous router getting anywhere close to advertised speeds. Go through start up menu disable qos and you should be good to go here. Hard wired I ended up with 942 mbps down and 42 up. My advertised speed is 1000 up and 35 down. Also DumoOS is much better then previous generation netgear os. It's cleaner more functional and the feature set is great especially for anyone who manages traffic and wants a clean / easy way to handle it. Now my previous router was a nighthawk x6 r8000 model. Also advertised as gig cable and it was surely not anywhere close to capable in my opinion. I had to tweak everything just get around 800 up. When i say eveyrthing I mean I even turned off dos protection qos, traffic metering, etc. Once I found other people with the same complaints on that router I was super disappointed in netgear. I didnt' want to look at another one of their products again. I took a chance at best buy because of the return policy. To be honest if I knew I was going to enjoy the router so much I would have spent more on the model up from the xr500 that has the quad core chipset. In all fairness with ax routers ritght around the corner I'm glad I didn't. Let's wrap this review up here. Netgear totally redeemed themselves in my opinion with this router and especially the nighthawk router line in general. To me a lot of them seemed like over priced marketing gimmicks full of features that the majority of users couldn't handle hiding behind a weak 1 ghz chipset for managing traffic / os / lan ports. In all honesty I think a lot of that holds true. However, for regular consumers sitting below the 300 mbps internet packages they'll never notice. The new 1.7 ghz chips being used really help this thing perform at gig speeds like it's supposed to. The router gives advertised speeds without much hassel or setup required by the technologically challenged. I hope netgear keeps this line of router alive and reputable because in my honest opinion if something this good comes out for the ax chipset I would be happy to purchase it as well. Also a great job implementing DumaOS. Their team needs a lot more credit here since the firmware on previous netgear routers was lacking.

I've used the AC2600 for about 2 weeks now and it's been fabulous! Setup was a breeze and I had no issues getting all of my devices connected to the network. In terms of gaming, I tested a few different online games on my Xbox. I was super impressed by how good the responsiveness was. For the price, this is hard to beat given the comparable routers I've seen on the market. Overall, it's great for gaming and 4k in my opinion. Note that I received this router free to test as a part of my participation in the F&F program. That aside, It's truly a great router!

Netgear Nighthawk XR500 is the best gaming router I have seen to date. It is everything high bandwidth user wants and more. Not just for gamers but also every power user that really needs control of their network. And there is no better OS for routers then DumaOS. It is just amazing. All the options are fully interactive and at my fingertips with the dashboard of DumaOS. Netgear has been making excellent routers for many many years but they all where lacking in operating system environment. This is the only one I really like. Not just because it has all cool pictures, charts and information but mostly for having all amazing features easily changeable and traceable in one place without even restarting the router. The setup is a breeze. Most of the needed settings are turned on my default and using automated configurations really speeds things up quite a bit. I’m currently running Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 for online gaming and I can tell you, my gaming experience has never been this good. CoD is finally playable and winnable. Thanks to this router I get pretty much no lag whatsoever. This is the first for me. Even though I usually get good ping but because of my old router ping would spike up for no apparent reason and ruin my game. XR500 is the first to recognize this issue and fix it with QoS bufferbloat sliders I’m finally able to get an A rating. This is very impressive since all my previous high end routers only got to a C rating. And best of all that QoS finally works the way I want it. I can decide how much bandwidth I want for each devise on my network. Also check out GEO Filter settings that will give you an edge over your opponents. Mu-MIMO improves performance when multiple devises transfer data at the same time. If you are a gamer you owe it to yourself to try this router. I also use VPN and this router is very easy to configure my VPN settings. Gaming thru a VPN tunnel is the best. Another feature worth mentioning is one SSID for both 2.4 and 5ghz networks. This router doesn’t need three different SSIDs it can manage all traffic just fine depending on the devise that is connecting. WiFi range is amazing on this router. I finally have no dead spots in my house and I can still connect two houses down the road. All my devices report full bars of connection and movie streaming is like watching it on dvd. No lag and no reconnecting and no buffering. Stability was the number one issue with my previous routers They always need to be rebooted. It is a huge problem when I’m at work and my wife is calling me with “Your internet doesn’t work” scream. I absolutely hate that when I spend a bunch of money and it still fails to keep a connection. Well I’m glad to report to you that those days are over. XR500 is extremely stable and doesn’t need reboots at all. It didn’t get stuck even once so far. I also configured it so that I can remote login and check out my network from anywhere. The only thing it is missing is a DumaOS app for my iPhone X but I’m able to use web interface and it works great. I’m having a blast with this router and would like to recommend it to you. After trying XR500 I will never look back at my other high end routers. Thank you Netgear for providing this wonderful complimentary router to me through first look review program.

So, I really love this router a lot. Having been cruising along on a regular old Nighthawk, I was curious to see how this entry would perform. I have to say, it did not disappoint. First things first, the DumasOS is great. It’s simple without being stupid. It pretty much sets itself up, but if you want to do something more advanced, you aren’t limited to ‘but would you like to install it in THIS folder instead?’ You know what I mean. When you install that game and you click advanced install and that’s your advanced choice. DumasOS is really nice in that, yes, it’s really easy to understand and to adjust things, but you have actual options that you can go in and fiddle with to tweak things to your liking. One of my favorite things about it was being able to go in and apportion your bandwidth. I feel kind of like Iron Man - “Router, divert all power to PS4. We’re about to binge play Destiny.” Seriously, though, as a person who has a whole lot of connected devices (and wow did I not realize how many until I got this router, incidentally), this is super handy because I’m often multi-tasking and not really paying attention to everything I have going on on all of those devices. I’m downloading, I’m gaming, I’m streaming. My attention span has moved out of all human understanding; don’t even try. (It also uses a lot of charts and graphs as visuals as opposed to just a list of numbers, which is very helpful for me, specifically. (Don’t worry; there are numbers, too.)). All of this maybe doesn’t seem so important, so let me try to lay this out for you: I have 2 gaming PCs, a laptop that I play less graphics heavy games on, 2 Playstations (though one is primarily used for streaming), the requisite smart phone and tablet, and various smart home devices. I’m using at least three of them at any given time. It’s really, really handy to see what’s going where and to be able to adjust it as I see fit, quickly and easily. Generally speaking, all of the little quality of life things this router has make my gaming - and streaming and downloading and uploading, etc, etc - that much easier. It’s pretty great. As a router, the XR500 performs well. As I imagine it is for everyone else, this is a dealbreaker. I mean, fantastic OS aside, what good is it if I can’t take my laptop in the other room without losing connectivity? I’m happy to report that I can, and frequently do. Again, for you, I live in a converted school that was apparently sturdy enough to serve as a fallout shelter. I’ve got concrete walls. I’ve got exposed brick. So far, I haven’t needed a single range extender. My fancy TV set-up is in the room furthest from the router and I’ve been able to stream and game wirelessly with no problems. I received this router as part of the NETGEAR First Look Review Program. My review still stands; I get really mean when about lag and connectivity issues.

I received this router for free from Netgear. I am not a heavy gamer, but I do play some Chinese online games from time to time, and it depends on the game, some are very laggy, and some are okay. I do stream video a lot, netflix/amazon/mibox and sometimes up to 3 concurrent steams. In the past, I have been using Netgear Nighthawk AC2300, typically didn't have much problem. Sometimes if I steam multiple videos the netflix detects it and degrade my quality and video gets pixelated. Now I have got this XR500, tried it for the past 2 weeks, here is what I have noticed. First impression, exterior doesn’t really look that good, but I don’t really care. However, the DumaOS is something that I am really impressed with. This is the first time I heard of it, and it’s super user friendly (better than Netgear’s own interface), easy customizable dashboard, lots of features that I didn’t even know is configurable. Not only the interface is good, overall the hardware and OS are super fast. The Chinese online game that was very laggy, still very laggy, I think they just have really bad servers or the way their program is written. But the games that I thought was doing fine, suddenly became a lot smoother when ran under XR500. I tried to steam 3 videos at same time just to test it, and I haven’t noticed any pixelating or degrade in quality so far. I thought I had a good router before, but now I realized this is even better. I am think DumaOS really brings out the performance of this machine. Definitely a keeper.

1st I have owned the NETDUMA gaming router, I sold it because it didn't support dual band wireless. It looks like NETDUMA has licensed their router technology to NETGEAR, the marriage is a beautiful sleek and awesome looking router, Setup was very easy. I was surprised when I saw the web-based interface, it's a little more polished than the NETDUMA interface, and very easy to use. The router is infinitely configurable! I spun up my XBOX-ONE and set the Geographic filters to reduce lag and started playing some Call Of Duty, THe gameplay was smooth as silk and I won my first match, despite not playing for a few weeks. Hit detection, shoot first and win, NO LAG! This is an amazing product, the DUMA-OS makes it exactly what you want as a gamer. NEATGEAR supplied me the XR500 GAMING ROUTER free of charge. I would buy this router anyway, with the DUMA-OS it makes for an AWESOME package!