Asus TUF Gaming TUF-AX4200 router review
Man, Asus makes a lot of routers. This one, built of charcoal-coloured plastic Batman might consider too aggressively angular, is a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 job with four Ethernet ports, four antennas, and a single USB port.
Compared with some, that’s an uninspiring number of appendages, but it really is all you need for a satisfying network experience if you’re just trying to share a broadband hookup between a gaming PC, a smart TV, and everybody’s phone. Asus also makes a point of the AX4200’s open NAT and ease of port forwarding, which will make stable online gaming connections easier.
From the outside, it’s not a bad looking unit. From the wedge-shaped school of design, with its four antennas standing straight from the back edge, it’s reasonably small, is light, and has wall-mounting slots on the back. It’s not completely covered in flashing lights either, so it’s going to work in a bedroom where you don’t want to wake up in the morning with logos emblazoned on your eyeballs.
There’s a degree of future-proofing in the form of a 2.5Gb WAN socket, for when connections that fast become commonplace, and if you use LAN integration on two of the Ethernet ports you’ll be able to pipe almost all that bandwidth to a single device—or you could use the 3603mbps of the 5GHz Wi-Fi connection.
TUF-AX4200 specs
As this isn’t a Wi-Fi 6 device there’s no 6GHz band, and we’d recommend avoiding the 2.4GHz network, or keeping it for low-demand devices, as not only is it congested but on this router tops out at 574mbps. That’s still quite a lot, but once you’ve got a few streaming sticks and phones connected you’ll want your gaming PC to use the higher frequency band. There’s beamforming onboard too, to maximise the internets in your general direction.
The antennas are permanently attached but still movable, and other than the orange flashed on their sides there’s very little that stands out about the AX4200. It’s the same sort of basic design we saw on the…
