so this is one of the most powerful router you can buy on the market right
now now for somebody that does a lot of online streaming and gaming a route
really is one of the most key parts of any home network so this is the XR 500
Nighthawk pro gaming Ruta from neck care now what makes this actually very
special is not really just the hardware itself the actual operating system on
this root R is by a company called net Douma now for the people that don't know
net Douma was actually a company that made the world's first gaming root ah so
what they've done here is they've actually teamed up with Netgear to
provide the operating system for net gears flagship Rooter so you get the
best hardware from net gear with the breast software from net Douma to give
you that perfect combination and just before we open it we can see spec wise
we get 2.4 gigahertz bandwidth up to 800 mix speed we get the 5 gigahertz
bandwidth up to 1733 megabit speed this has four high performing antennas you
get the additional DFS channels on the 5 gigahertz brand for interference free
gaming this does have a dual core processor running at 1.7 gigahertz you
get a total of five four Gigabit Ethernet ports one is for your one
connection which is your internet coming in then you have for outbound for your
home network then you'll still get two USB 3 ports so if you want to plug in a
USB hard drive or if you wanna share files over the network you can plug them
into the USB ports and they'll be automatically shared across all the
devices on your home network ok let's open that up
ok so first up with the actual Rooter here just open that up ok so he does
have a very aggressive look here we have LEDs at the front for you got the
Internet you got your 2.4 gigahertz 5 gigahertz bands
you got your USB port and then the individual Ethernet ports you have a
button here for WPS so this is how you pair your router with devices that
support the one-click pairing so instead of entering in a password to join your
wireless network you press this button on your router
select the option on your device and then to compare up without any passwords
on the left side you do have two USB 3 ports so as previously mentioned you can
very easily just plug in a USB hard drive or a USB memory stake and those
files will be shared with all the devices on your home network I guess on
the back here we've got the on and off switch for the power
we've got the antenna one slot this is where you'd be plugging in your internet
so if you have a cable modem or a different modem you plug that directly
into here and this will then share your internet with the other devices on your
home network and then we have four dedicated gigabit
ports so having gigabits is 10 times faster and having your standard hundred
Meg's so it's great to see we have a total of 4 gigabit ports here you have
another antenna slot here you got the reset switch because here we
can see you've got an LED on an off switch which means if you don't want to
have all of these LEDs at the front because maybe they're distracting or you
just don't like them you can turn the switch off here and that will then just
disable them for you underneath we have four rubber feet and we got some cooling
vents here I mean the front readers look like a like a sports car or like a
spaceship I'm and we does have those aggressive lines here which I personally
like no you also get a Quick Start Guide we get the result CD we get a total of
four antennas we get to power bricks you get the UK and you get international and
last you get an Ethernet cable so this is everything you get inside the box
let me now plug this into my home network I'll take you through the setup
process I'll show you some of the features that has some of the cool
things and we'll see if the Rooter really does live up to the claim that
this is the best gaming rutile on the market right now
okay so I've just plugged in the new root into my modem and normally when I
change anything in my home network the first thing I also like to do is run a
speed test now before I actually change the route oh I didn't want a speed test
using my previous route ah which also happens to be an icky root ah so I did a
speed test using that root ah my download speed was about 72 Meg and my
upload was about 15 makes so that's basically the benchmark I'm gonna work
with let's see how the neck gear XR 500 performs so let's go to the standard
speed test on that speed site and let's do a speed test now okay so downstream
we can see working about 72 KS k up to about 74 MEC downstream okay so with the
XR 500 I'm getting at a low speed of 74 Meg and an upload speed of 16 Meg's so
so that is in line or the speeds I would expect when doing these kind of speed
tests now if we just go into the root of management page which we can do by
either typing in the IP address of your router or you can just go to Rooter log
in dotnet okay we can see we now get prompts so let me just look into the
Rooter and here we have a guy so this is the home screen of the duma OS operating
system which this Netgear is currently running so you can see guys it does look
like a lot of stuff is going on on the home screen but all of this is
customizable now in terms of configuration all I had to do was just
go into settings and in the Internet setup I just have to type in my
credentials for my modem so now as previously mentioned all I've done is
I've removed the old route ah which my modem was previously plugged into and
then plugged the same modem into the new XR 500 all I need to do then is just
going to the Internet setup and typing the same credentials again and here we
can see has correctly picked up my external IP address and these are the
DNS servers that my ISPs assigned me now for example hey guys if we didn't want
to change these DNS servers so let's say you want to use add god DNS which is
video I made yesterday so if you do want to block adverts at the root level you
can update these two DNS servers here that means all of the devices on my home
network will now use the add god DNS servers so those devices won't see any
adverts anymore alternatively if you don't use your ISPs DNS servers you
can also use DNS servers provided by Google or CloudFlare or some of the
other providers so those options are really up to you the other key thing you
can configure here is your wireless setup so and here we can set the
different options for 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz now in my household I like
to have both these enabled because I do have some older devices which only
support the 2.4 gigahertz so you can basically configure those here set the
password set the channels for the two networks and you're good to go I am
planning on doing a separate video just on basic tweaks or basic enhancements
you can do to any root 2 that you're using so if you do want to see a video
like that just on you know how to tweak your root R or some of those hidden
settings mean and just have to get the best from it then please do leave me a
comment below and I'll add that to my scheduled video list and we can see guys
there's all these other options here which are pretty much standard on any
root that you get these days but let me show you some of the special options or
some of the special features that make this fruit a special root or I sure
didn't mention before that with USB storage if I was to plug a USB stick or
a USB hard drive into one of the 2 USB 3 ports then we can see I'll have the
option to enable the media server then that media content on those USB hard
drives or those USB sticks will be available to all the devices on my home
network and all actually appear as a media server so I can stream movies from
America and stream photos or audio or music files or anything like that and
the way this is built in makes it very very easy to use
ok so the first cool thing I like to share guys is we have this thing called
a Geo filter now what is the Geo filter actually before I explained that the
other great thing about this números is is every single section in this entire
interface has this help icon over here so it's not a case of like I don't know
this thing is I need to open up a manual or anything else any section that you're
actually confused about you can go to the right of it and you'll see there's a
small help thing here you can click on that and this will give you more
information just about the section that you're on so for example here we can say
what's this geo filter is if I click on that so it's basically telling us that
the main cause of lag in console games such as call of duty fifa or destiny is
basically how far the servers are that you're trying to connect to so let's say
for example here we can see I'm in the UK
if I try and play a server-based in you know South America or in Australia
because of the actual geographic distance it's inevitable that I'm going
to get lag in my games I'm a very high ping time I'm gonna get a lot of latency
so the Geo filter basically asks you to do is is you can set a maximum radius or
a maximum distance that I only want to see service I only wanna join games
which are within a certain radius so we can see here I've said this is my home
location and then we can say for example I only want to see things within this
radius so very small radius so so the Geo filter is basically going to ensure
that I get the best connection by blocking out servers and players are too
far from me for me to connect to or join games so so because of that block I'm
only going to join games are closer to me which means I should be able to get a
much better paying time and have minimal latency and up here you can basically
choose which device you want to actually enable this geo filter for so here we
can see for example I've added in my playstation but if you just go over here
we can see we can add in up to four devices of Xbox one another PlayStation
so you can add in all of those devices and there'll be a part of your geo
filter now the next great feature is you've got the QoS which is the quality
of service so now this is actually a massive benefit and something if you do
have lot of devices on your home network as you can see here there's a ton of
stuff in the TD UK household just devices and tablets and computers and
fire stakes and video doorbells and just just lot of devices all using the same
internet connection now what the QoS allows you to do is is you can basically
set upload and download bandwidth limits per device so you can say so you can
basically say these devices which are hogging the bandwidth because let's say
somebody's on the PlayStation and you know downloading big files or somebody
else is on another device and doing a lot of torrenting I mean legal because
of that that could clog up your network for all of the remaining devices so you
can do here is you can say so for example I can say this Amazon device
which must be a fire TV or maybe a forest stake I can allocate this just 10
percent of my total bandwidth so no matter what I'm doing when I divorce
them are what apks are running no matter what streaming is happening that device
will never take more than 10 percent of my total bandwidth so just having that
granular control on all of devices on your home network I think
it's a fantastic feature of this route oh now the other great feature we have
on the same page is the anti buffer bloat
now the Anti Buffalo basically prevents any system or any device on your home
network which all of a sudden is gonna start consuming your bandwidth so let's
say for example you turn on an old Windows computer which hasn't done a
Windows Update for a long time so that's gonna start a massive download or if you
start a certain game like fortnight or Battlefield and then you do a big update
that one device where that game is running is all of a sudden going to
consume all your bandwidth that means for other people in the house or let's
say for example if I'm trying to do a live stream or if I'm trying to play a
game online then my machine is going to be severely affected because the other
device of my home network is actually doing a big update and it's basically
consuming all of my bandwidth so to combat that guys I can just basically
say that nothing on my home network should ever consume more than 70%
download and here we can just see we get a probe saying anti buffer blur is
active you can now play games without any greedy divorce application causing
you to lag and I says it because we've set the high priority traffic mode this
basically means that the buffer blur is only active when you're playing games so
if nobody's playing a game on my home network then this anti buffer blow is
not going to limit the bandwidth on that one machine I was previously you know
doing the big download so this only becomes active when you actually start
gaming so and we can see it says that all console games and PC games will be
automatically detected so as soon as you start playing this will activate the
buffer below but if nobody's playing a game then it's only limit the bandwidth
for any of your devices now the device manager is a great feature of the XR 500
root are you get a really nice bird's-eye view about all of the devices
on your home network and exactly how they're communicating with the router so
here we can see for example these are the devices on the 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi you
call the devices here these devices up here on the 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi and then
these devices are connected over Ethernet so just having this view makes
it very easy to see exactly we have running on your network if there's any
devices I shouldn't be on there for example it'll be very easy to spot now
the network monitor is also a great feature because it allows you to see
exactly what devices on your home network are currently consuming
bandwidth and we can see the devices are chronic consuming most of the bandwidth
or download and upload we can see the red bar how much is currently
downloading and with the blue bar how much is currently uploading again so you
have a really nice overall view about exactly what's happening on your home
network now the other great feature you have is you have the ability to pin any
of these modular components to your home dashboard so just to go back there again
for example here we can see we have network overview which I'm not too
interested in so if I just click on this pin here that basically removes it from
the home dashboard now if I go back to Network Monitor and let's say I rather
have this on the home dashboard avenues click on this icon up here we see that
icon changes and we go back to the home dashboard we can see that module has now
been added to the home dashboard so you do really get that full granular control
about exactly what gets displayed on your home dashboard and you can
basically move these around as you wish so let's say for example rather move
this over here you slide that across and I'll just update straight away so really
easy to control really easy to customize now lastly in the system information you
get some of the other panels that you could add to your dashboard so we can
see the CPU usage the RAM usage and some yeah the modules down here so again if
you want to add any of these to the home screen you can click on the pin here and
this will automatically update your home dashboard so in summary I would say I'm
extremely pressed with the neck care Nighthawk XR 500 Pro Rooter now I always
say as a testament to how good something is is if I should use it myself so this
has actually replaced the main Rueter in my house so I'm definitely very
impressed with it now some of the highlights for me or the fact that we do
get the duma OS operating system now this really is a slick OS and as we can
just see guys doing very advanced features like you know custom QoS geo
filtering it literally is a case of just you know clicking a few things dragging
a few things and you can get those advanced features implemented on your
home network just with a few clicks it really as simple as that on top of that
you get the individual bandwidth allocation so again as we saw in my
house because I have so many different devices
I can now a very granular level just choose exactly how much each my devices
gets in terms of bandwidth I can very easily see if there's any device that's
actually consuming a lot of bandwidth and then easily limit that so they
really have made it very very easy to use I also like the fact that the Deemer
OS is actually really fast and responsive I've seen lots of what the
root is in the past where you know you click on different things in the you
why and it takes you know five or ten seconds before it displays anything but
as we saw the stuff I did guys it was actually really responsive now the price
is probably the only negative thing where this is not a cheap route or this
does cost about two hundred fifty pounds but again for the people that really
want the best possible connection with the best connectivity with the least
latency the least lag then for those people I'm sure there'll be 100 percent
happy to pay that price because once you get it you will have that peace of mind
that laggy latency you're just going to be a thing of the past
well that's all for this video guys many thanks for watching and many thanks were
staying till the end if you do want to find out more information about this
route then I will leave some links in the description do leave me a comment
below let me know he think about the XR 500 and I'll hopefully catch up with you
guys real soon thanks
No comments:
Post a Comment