Well, the Netgear has DumaOS, which is basically a gaming oriented operating system and user interface. The hardware is actually a little dated but many would say it’s “established”, which is a good thing! It’s horribly over-priced, but if you check enough reviews you soon realise that people just love DumaOS.
The XR500 has an amazingly good user interface. It is intuitive and just so easy. Everything is logically laid out and there is exactly what you want to know. There is comprehensive performance monitoring so you can see what the router is up to when you play games. You can tweak settings to avoid situations that may cause lag, and you can set priorities and bandwidth for games and gaming machines. And of course there is Geo Location, which I am sure you have heard of.
All in all it’s just what a gamer needs. Don’t underestimate the importance of good monitoring either, often with routers you are left wondering whether everything is running as well as it can be. It may well be running just fine, but do you know? With DumaOS you do! So even if this gaming router doesn’t give you better performance it will at least give you peace of mind that you are achieving the best possible performance.
The router arrived and was well boxed albeit nothing fancy. There was the router, four aerials a Cat5e cable and two PSU’s. Yes, believe it or not there was a UK PSU and an EU one too. The router was actually somewhat smaller than I expected as well. The measurements they give for it include the width and depth of the aerials, even though oddly they don't include the height of the aerials.
Plugging it in, it launched itself in to a setup. Just for fun I opted for the auto setup and just left it to it’s own devices. It did “something” for a while ( honestly I think manual would have been a lot faster ) and it connected with success. It then checked my internet speed, which seemingly took forever, and eventually announced that it failed. Thanks to Youtube, I was actually expecting that. You can enter the numbers in manually later in the buffer-bloat setup. It then went through a setup that seemed to take forever. Finally it updated the firmware and it was done. It asked me to register the router, taking me to the website, then returning me and ending the installation. The operating system is a bit slow to respond but that’s perhaps not surprising, its very graphical so it going to be slow.
It does take a while to understand the interface. I found that as I spent time in there it all made more sense and started to do what it was supposed to do. I still haven’t discovered everything, but you certainly do need to spend some time finding your way around it.
As I switched on devices around the home so they appeared on the network map. Some of them it didn’t recognise so I had to tell it what they are and give them a nice name. So all in all really you need a few hours messing about and probably several days of gentle tweaking to get everything sorted. This is a router you need to fiddle with, but it’s all very user friendly and easy to do… not at all like a normal router. You know this because you tend to keep the dashboard open all the time, monitoring what’s going on. When was the last time you ever did that with a router?
One thing that did occur to me, is that the Netgear is carefully controlling traffic to and from the Internet but it’s not doing anything over the local net. In other words if you say have a NAS on the network and someone watching a video, then that traffic is unmonitored and uncontrolled. This actually seems like a pretty major flaw in the design. All the nice features of the router just work on access to the net. As soon as I realised this I actually bought a separate switch to isolated cross-talk from non-gaming devices. Not least because the Netgear only has four ports which is very low for such an expensive router.
Now the bad news! It was actually slower than my old router. With QOS completely disabled and using a hardwired connection, it showed exactly the same broadband upload and download speeds, but unfortunately the ping was 1ms higher. That’s seriously disappointing for a router that is supposed to be heavily optimised for gaming because gaming is all about ping.
Now the even worse news. The one place it seriously lets you down is the one thing you bought it for in the first place. It doesn't recognise any games. Well, 15 to be precise, and one of those is Skype. I mean seriously? 15? So beyond that you are reduced to entering the port numbers exactly the same as any other router, which I for the life of me do not understand. I mean it all seems to be different on every router and this is no exception. Seriously, I did not spend £240 on a router to be confronted with a blank wall on something so fundamental.
Now the even worse news. The above would be one thing, but right now if you put any numbers at all in to the advanced prioritisation port config it crashes, lol. Well, if it didn't cost £240 it would be funny. This is a known problem and hopefully will be fixed soon but really it just begs the question, on a gaming router where prioritisation is everything, it crashes if you enter prioritisation? Seriously?
Now the stupid news for people who use gaming VPN's. You see the part in the description where is says it supports your VPN? It doesn't. You can't use them with this router. Believe it or not the only VPN service the router supports is HMA. I don't actually use a gaming VPN but plenty of people do. Well you can't configure it in this router. The only option is HMA which is just about the worst VPN for net safety and of course is not optimised for gaming.
Is it worth the money? Definitely not. For some reason this router has been hyped to a ridiculous degree. The problem is that really it's not actually offering anything new in functionality apart from Geo Location and that is for consoles not PC's. There is definitely a future for the user interface and you may be mad enough to want that right away but it just it just has too many problems right now. Wait for the price to reduce by 50% and them to fix the bugs. I have absolutely no doubt that it's wildly over-priced and while it's a great interface, the average person is really not going to be much better off with this router. Maybe even worse. You still have to struggle with trying to find ports and stuff for games you want to play. So really, buy a cheaper router and find out how to prioritise games manually ~ you are going to have to anyway, and just don't listen to the reviewers hype.
After a week the first major problem raised it's head. During the night, with wireless off and only one PC connected to the router, and even that PC was idle, the router just locked up. In the morning the router would not respond at all. I have seen this problem reported some eight months ago and it seems that no solution has been found.
Well this review is unlikely to be updated now because I am about to return the router. Again, don't listen to the hype. This surely is a great OS but its not ready. Give it a few years and it will be an absolute winner but right now you really have to decide whether you can live with the bugs. Maybe you can. To me the Asus RT-AC88U is the better router. It's less friendly than the Netgear and it doesn't have Geo Location, but at least it doesn't fall over every week.
| Wireless Type | 802.11n, 802.11b, 802.11g |
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