Netgear XR700 Gaming Router Review & Comments

[Greg Hook]

We take a look at Netgear's very top end £449 XR700 Gaming Router, featuring their fully customisable DumaOS gaming dashboard and more features than you can shake a stick at.
Read the review.

Write your own review for Netgear XR700

 

[Jonny Ware]

Very interesting article, Netgear aren't responsible for the DumaOS, that is made by a different company NetDuma (based in Cambridge apparently).

The smarthub is a very good hub for free, to get better internet speeds have to go to different 3rd party routers (using better modem chipsets).

I wonder how the Smarthub X compares!

 

[Mister_Tad]

I'm struggling to see what the real value is in a single 10GbE port beyond being able to plaster it all over their marketing collateral. I'm even more surprised they went with SFP+ as opposed to 10Gbase-T or even 802.3bz

At £449 we are at the very top end of routers, so much so in fact that there are very few we could find as alternatives that are priced this high.

Not at all - at £449 we're at the very top end of consumer routers.

At this price point, not acknowledging that this puts potential buyers amongst SMB gear is a fairly big omission IMO.

 

[Evinger]

Sounds a waste of Money.
Sticking with my ASUS RT-AC87U. Not everyone likes Asus, but I've found them fast and Rock Solid. We have a Glass 400 Down 20 Up connection here and with 15 devices including streaming for our ATV 4K & Apple Music separately via iPad in the Kitchen, never a stutter. I restarted it 6 months ago last time.

And, no, I don't work for Asus

 

[vmistery]

I'm struggling to see what the real value is in a single 10GbE port beyond being able to plaster it all over their marketing collateral. I'm even more surprised they went with SFP+ as opposed to 10Gbase-T or even 802.3bz



Not at all - at £449 we're at the very top end of consumer routers.

At this price point, not acknowledging that this puts potential buyers amongst SMB gear is a fairly big omission IMO.

Agree on strange choice using SFP+ on a 'gaming' router, only having one seems fine as it is unlikely any 'gaming' category consumer even really needs 10Gigabit speeds and if they do it will probably be for a single NAS, worst case bung a switch in. This router though is most certainly not something I would put in an SMB environment, I don't really even like using their managed switches unless the budget is tight!

 

[Mister_Tad]

Agree on strange choice using SFP+ on a 'gaming' router, only having one seems fine as it is unlikely any 'gaming' category consumer even really needs 10Gigabit speeds and if they do it will probably be for a single NAS, worst case bung a switch in.

IMO the key benefit of 10Gb in a home environment is the point-to-point speed. Even if you plumb a NAS into your 10Gb, you're still unlikely to getting more than a gigabit-plus-change out of it. An extra 1Gb port with LACP support would be of equal or greater value to the user - but not to the marketer.

This router though is most certainly not something I would put in an SMB environment, I don't really even like using their managed switches unless the budget is tight!

Oh for sure not. Not within a mile of SMB.

What I mean is, instead of spanking nigh-on-£500 for this to use at home, the potential buyer would be wise to consider SMB alternatives.

 

[psychopomp1]

What I mean is, instead of spanking nigh-on-£500 for this to use at home, the potential buyer would be wise to consider SMB alternatives.

Or even better buy the Netgear R9000 for £340 - which is exactly the same as the XR700 hardware wise but without the “gaming features “, load third party firmware such as DD-WRT Or Voxel firmware on the R9000, and you have a powerful router with very slick and advanced firmware which lets you do a zillion and one things

 

[vmistery]

IMO the key benefit of 10Gb in a home environment is the point-to-point speed. Even if you plumb a NAS into your 10Gb, you're still unlikely to getting more than a gigabit-plus-change out of it. An extra 1Gb port with LACP support would be of equal or greater value to the user - but not to the marketer.

Point to point with what? If it is another NAS or whatever then this probably wouldn't be the target audience for this router or you'd have a switch seperately to connect your other devices.

 

[Mister_Tad]

Point to point with what? If it is another NAS or whatever then this probably wouldn't be the target audience for this router or you'd have a switch seperately to connect your other devices.

Point to point between a client and a NAS, pretty much the only place 10Gbit speeds are actually useful in the standard home, or at least the sort of home that's likely to consider a £450 router - which is why the inclusion of just one 10Gb port on this has severely limited value. It's not like you're going to have multiple clients really hammering it to even start to touch the sides of that one 10Gb pipe.

 

[vmistery]

Point to point between a client and a NAS, pretty much the only place 10Gbit speeds are actually useful in the standard home, or at least the sort of home that's likely to consider a £450 router - which is why the inclusion of just one 10Gb port on this has severely limited value. It's not like you're going to have multiple clients really hammering it to even start to touch the sides of that one 10Gb pipe.

I would imagine the idea is that multiple connected devices could use up some of that bandwidth, I can't see why a gamer would need to have that kind of bandwidth between them and their NAS.

 

[Mister_Tad]

I would imagine the idea is that multiple connected devices could use up some of that bandwidth, I can't see why a gamer would need to have that kind of bandwidth between them and their NAS.

Well that's the thing - "A Gamer", as in just one, can't make use of the 10Gb port on this at all, multiple users would be the only way to start to see any benefit. So if you and your nine other housemates (or probably more, since at least 4 of them would be on wireless and unlikely to hit 1Gbit even with wifi6) all decided at the exact same time that they wanted to pull down a large file from the NAS, you might see near-1GB/sec of throughput

Having 10Gb between a PC and NAS is wonderful. Granted "need" is a strong word, but it makes a world of difference when moving multi-GB files back and forth. But you're never going to see it on this bit of kit, leading me to my conclusion that this port is included solely for the marketers.

Just take this from their product page...

THE 10G SETUP YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

Finally, a router that you can use to create a perfect 10G gaming setup. Speed up the link between your router and gaming PC by up to 10 times faster when playing online

Nonsense.

 

[SgtRock]

h for sure not. Not within a mile of SMB.

What I mean is, instead of spanking nigh-on-£500 for this to use at home, the potential buyer would be wise to consider SMB alternatives.

Indeed can't see the point of 10Gb, I wonder if the backplane could even handle 10Gb.

I'd be looking at rolling my own device with pfSense for that sort of money.

 

[FaxFan2002]

High end Asus motherboards come with the ad wifi, but at short range you might as well stick a cable between them...

 

[gagaga]

For most UK houses, a single AP on the ceiling of the hallway will get a signal to all rooms in the house with only 1 door/wall in the way. If you can get a CAT 6 cable in place for ethernet/POE you can just swap out the AP every 4-5 years as the standards change.
I've done this on my past 3 houses with a single Ubiquiti AP and get 200mbps+ everywhere. They cost ~ £70 and you can get TP link equivalents for about £35 if you don't need the management functionality of the Unifi gear.

 

[Goodmane]

For most UK houses, a single AP on the ceiling of the hallway will get a signal to all rooms in the house with only 1 door/wall in the way. If you can get a CAT 6 cable in place for ethernet/POE you can just swap out the AP every 4-5 years as the standards change.
I've done this on my past 3 houses with a single Ubiquiti AP and get 200mbps+ everywhere. They cost ~ £70 and you can get TP link equivalents for about £35 if you don't need the management functionality of the Unifi gear.

What brand access point do you use on the ceiling? I'd never seen one pretty enough to put on the ceiling...?

 

[Mister_Tad]

What brand access point do you use on the ceiling? I'd never seen one pretty enough to put on the ceiling...?

"Pretty" is a stretch, but Ubiquiti Unifi APs are mainly inoffensive.

However I've found no fewer than three of them are needed to reach every nook and cranny in the house.

 

[gagaga]

What brand access point do you use on the ceiling? I'd never seen one pretty enough to put on the ceiling...?

This is the basic one - they make a long range version and a HD version with the latest standards as well (i've got the LR plus an AC Pro)
UniFi AC Lite

You can turn off the light so it look like a slightly oversized smoke alarm (and certainly is less offensive to look at than most smoke alarms).

However I've found no fewer than three of them are needed to reach every nook and cranny in the house.

Guessing it's got walls a metre thick or lots of floors? My place is 20m wide (1 story) and just one of them gives usable signal across the whole house, 2 gives strong signal everywhere (reasonable distance to the neighbours, so only see 2 other networks at the extreme ends of the house, no other networks in the middle).

 

[bogart99]

Should there be any difference at all in a speedtest result depending ones modem/router setup?
I though that was purely dependant on, in my case, two bits of wet string going off into the ether

 

[Mister_Tad]

Guessing it's got walls a metre thick or lots of floors? My place is 20m wide (1 story) and just one of them gives usable signal across the whole house, 2 gives strong signal everywhere (reasonable distance to the neighbours, so only see 2 other networks at the extreme ends of the house, no other networks in the middle).

Three floors, the odd block wall internally, the rest cavity walls stuffed with insulation - not an idea environment for RF, but then houses tend not to be. I have one per floor in a roughly central position. The top ceiling-mounted AP could make a decent run at going solo for most of the house, but would leave some areas with single-mbit speeds and others with drop-offs, so the other two are excellent at filling those, getting 5GHz into more areas and spreading the load.

 

[mickevh]

Should there be any difference at all in a speedtest result depending ones modem/router setup?
I though that was purely dependant on, in my case, two bits of wet string going off into the ether

Oh yes:

In no particular order and to pick a couple of random examples - If you choose modem that doesn't sync well with the one in the local exchange, if your modem doesn't cope with noise well, if you choose a router that doesn't have enough "routing capacity" (horsepower if you will) for the bandwidth required. One of the tests Tim at SmallNetBuilder does is to test the "WAN-to-LAN" routing capacity.

But unless you're a nerd determined to squeeze every drop of potential performance out of the kit, generally I'm a bit "zen" such things and if it's working well enough, I tend to not worry about it. Viz, my current laptop has a miserable 72mbps NIC in it when my AP can do 450mbps, but for day to day Internet surfing it's just fine, so I just get on with life instead of stressing about it.

 

[bogart99]

450mbps I can only dream of such figures on my as stated 2 bits of wet string.

 

[mickevh]

450 is "only" my potential Wi-Fi link rate, my broadband is - er, actually I've no idea what 40something I think, but it's more than enough for my needs. One appreciates that those languishing on the end of truely poor rates would love to have something in the tens. (And I remember when 9600 bps modems were considered "high speed." )

There's something of a belief that poor broadband rates is a "rural" problem, but if can be rotten in town too. One job I held, we have a site on (barely) 10mbps in the middle of Notting Hill.