I just upgraded from a Nighthawk R7900P to a R9000 and it made a noticeable difference in both speed and stability. The old R7900P is now in AP mode for the other side of the house.
Here’s the best part: I picked them both up at the local thrift store. Threw the latest firmwares at them and they’ve been great, other than the older 7900 being a bit slow to respond and taking longer to boot, etc. I feel that buying older equipment that has had time to get the necessary updates, has lost its value and otherwise has had the outright failures weeded out tends to work better for me.
Sure, they aren’t the latest and greatest, but most of us don’t need that. We just need reasonably stable devices that support the devices and features we use and provide the security and support to keep us reasonably safe.
Not an expert but sharing my very recent experience.
I had an old nighthawk Netgear router from 2018 that started to act up, so I got a newer WiFi 7 router from Netgear (RS90) and it was even worse than the old one. After hours on the phone with tech support they couldn’t do much, so I returned it and went with a TP-Link WiFi 6 mesh (Deco X55 AX3000) and it has been working great.
yeah I stopped buying gaming routers 4 years ago. I was on my 3rd nighthawk - they would no joke die consistently 2-3 months after their warranty expired. 3 of them in a row, like clockwork.
I went with a mesh system and I am very pleased with it. it allows me to have solid fast wifi in my detached garage, which wasn't possible with the gaming router. and I have overall way better signal on the other stories of my house. I get close to 1 gig on wifi now. the mesh system, which includes 4 routers, was also cheaper than my nighthawk.
never going back tbh
You can totally get away with 1 router.
How I have it set up, is I have a 5HGz router (nighthawk) controlling all my home WiFi needs. Off the back of that router, I have a Ethernet cable going to another router (my BE9300 TP link) and that’s in my room.
My BE9300 broadcast its own WiFi 6GHz network, aka my dedicated VR network that nothing else is on it.
A common misconception is that streaming VR to your headset uses your internet connection. This is completely false. It just used the WiFi band AS its connection to your headset uses set. This is how you can play WiFi with no internet on standalone games completed disconnected from the web.
What can cause issues is when multiple devices are fighting for the connection and it can intermittently interrupt the VR connection from time to time making to jarring.
When I used my 5GHz network on my nighthawk there was noticeable hitches and high latency issues at times. Ever since I swapped to my 6GHz BE9300 it’s been flawless.
So your set up would be like this:
Modem > Router (for home WiFi) > ethernet to VR router > VR router Ethernet to PC
If you want to try without a dedicated VR router it’s this:
Modem > Router > Ethernet to PC
It’s pretty simple and isn’t complicated as people make it out to be.
I’d recommend watching this if you’re interested in the VR router setup. But if it’s in the same room that you’ll be gaming on, you can probably get away with a router that just does triband (2.4,5,6GHz) networks
https://youtu.be/9Ugy8ZC26tE?si=YojtyVEOvNc--3GB
I agree. I have tried numerous Netgear products, going back to a PCMCIA card, and all of them have had problems. The last Nighthawk I had constantly resulted in "Connected, No internet" for too many devices.
HuyFongFood
