Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

To begin, I've been through many routers and can tell you what almost every advanced setting does. I like to tweak everything and always use custom firmware. I was previously using an RT-AC3200 running Merlin, which died after several years. If you're like me, you might be remiss to give up that custom firmware. I was very worried about it. In the end I don't see why people complain, this isn’t as good as Merlin but it's fine. I miss some features like site survery, but all the important stuff is here. You DON'T have to use the phone app to setup the router, you can login to the IP just like normal don't worry. The phone app is pretty limited, but it has its uses. The firmware is not as snappy as Merlin but honestly the annoyance was minimal. I tested the router as hard as I could by streaming a 60GGB 4K HDR rip to my Shield, a 4K stream to my laptop, a 4k stream to my desktop, running 3 torrents over ethernet, and an HD stream on my phone and had no hiccups or problems at all. The QoS feature seems to work fairly well. I'm also using smart connect and so far the frequencies its selecting are appropriate for each device. It goes up to channel 128 which nobody near me has, this has left me in great shape signal wise. IPhone 10+ and Mac Pro work fine with channel 128. The router does not run hot, it runs cold compared to any other router I 've seen. The fully offloaded CPU probably has a lot to do with that. The device feels half the weight of my old router as well. I'm glad I went with this slightly cheaper 6 stream model. It seems to be far more than enough for me and future proof with wifi 6. Negatives: During setup on the phone app it kept saying "unable to connect" after firmware update and during one or two other steps. Just go to your phone settings and turn wifi on and off, reconnect to router, and go back into app. This solves the problem. The process delayed me maybe 30 seconds total. Or do yourself a favor and just use the old 192.168.1.1 for the setup. Its only dual-band. I'm used to tri-band but I can't tell a difference to be honest. Not a very important feature it seems. Edit: I ran into some compatibility errors after enabling mu-mimo in the advanced settings. I suggest leaving this off until you can test it on its own.