Before I start let me just say that wifi performance can vary depending on your home/apartment walls material and interference. I've read some great and some good reviews about the GT-AC5300. Some reviews say it's way too much money to spend and some say it's great in every way. At the end of the day, the only way to know what you will like is BUYING IT and TESTING IT for days.
I ended up testing both the RT-AC5300 and the GT-AC5300 to see which one I liked more. I ended up sticking to the GT-AC5300 for some good reasons; hardware specs, tools and the awesome webui that I liked the most. I will go over the things I liked first and then what things I didn't find too great which was totally not a deal breaker at all. If 8 ports and gaming boosts with the different webui is not a thing for you then the RT-AC5300 is more than enough to support your network. Plus with the RT version you can get merlin firmware (asus alternative firmware that is a more minimalist approach which I really like. I spend a good time also on small netbuilder website and its forums to watch how the GT-AC5300 firmware improved over the past year.
Hardware - This router has pretty insane specs. A 1.8Ghz CPU with 1GB of ram. This thing is like a gaming computer, pretty nuts. The bootup is a bit faster than the RT-AC5300. The 8 ports are one of the reasons I liked this one including the link aggregation. By the way, if you will not use this feature you need to turn it off so that you can use port 5+6 with different devices or they won't connect! I tested the network under heavy load with my smart TV doing netflix 4k along with my laptop transferring files to my NAS in the same time over wifi at over 75 MB/sec and the wife watching her youtube videos on her cellphone with zero issues. I do know that the GT-AC5300 and the RT-86U both have the newer wifi chips so that's nice.
Connectivity - A neat feature are the first two gaming ports that I use for my two gaming stations. I noticed they get a little nice performance boost. Things just respond faster on the network, the web and gaming wise. Lovely feature. I also really like the dashboard webui that shows network ping and ping deviation. Another feature that I have yet to test but is really awesome is the VPN fusion where you are able to assign specific clients on your network to be on VPN. I attached speed tests I did on speedtest by ookla and dslreports.com. DSLreports one can vary as their servers aren't really the best but it shows that the QOS I setup works well so I have zero complaints there. Keep in mind that these tests can vary time to time depending on the server load. There are times you can have bit slower speeds which doesn't mean you have any issues on your end. Before I got these two routers to setup I actually had spectrum come out to improve my cable signal since the signal was too strong (I only have the cable modem I use in my apartment complex so usually they send stronger signals since most homes have more than one device). I was also getting more error logs in on my Netgear CM600 cable modem before the fix and after the fix I only would get maybe one T3 error in 3 weeks now instead of a few daily. Wifi range and speed are absolutely incredible just amazing.
Gaming/Performance - I really love the gaming features of this router. When you combine the WTfast gaming network with the game boost for specific game like how I tested for Destiny 2 for PS4, you can get some pretty damn low pings in the low 10's. I really like also the game radar that shows you the servers that are close to you in your region. For the WTfast network, it only boosts one device for free which is perfectly fine as I mainly do online gaming more on the PS4. I used to play world of warcraft a lot on my PC but I quit that game a while back. Overall compared to the RT-AC5300 I like these small features that the GT version comes with that helps in small ways. Anything that helps to me is good in my book!
Here are some other things I noted that weren't maybe the best about the GT-AC5300 which I can improve over time.
Wifi radar. When I initially tried this the feature just did not work. I found out that you actually have to click the "start data collection" button to be able to scan the wifi in your area to get information.The information you can gather is quiet nice and can be useful.
5GHz-1 and 5GHz-2 Wifi performance. The two wifi bands actually have different performance. The 2nd 5GHz has better signal and performance than the 1st one. I verified this using the wifi analyzer app on my phone and the wifi radar app on the router. I disabled the 2.4GHz and will leave the 1st 5GHz for visitors/friends to use while I use the 2nd faster wifi band. I am using the latest firmware that is dated 9/19/2018 which has noted "fixed wifi stability issue." Not that I have any wifi problems or stability issues but that's kind of interesting. I sort of was hoping that maybe in future Merlin would support this router and make firmware for it but that is definitely not going to happen as the hardware is quiet different.
That's all. Overall I highly recommend the GT-AC5300 if you really are going to use the awesome features it comes with, want the 8 LAN ports and better hardware specs. I am just in love with this router and it's awesome features.
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
|---|---|
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
