My new Asus RT-AC88U Wireless-AC100 Dual-band Gigabit gaming router
This is an upgrade to my previous Asus RT-AC87U router. No, I don't actually need it for ultra high-end gaming… the key reason was my AC87U only had 64k of NVRAM which was constantly full and I was finding my traffic stats monitoring was stalling. This new router has 128k of NVRAM which is now only 71k utilised. I flash my Asus routers with Asuswrt-Merlin firmware (https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca) which squeezes some extra functionality out of them and probably also fills that NVRAM a little more than normal.
So apart from that, this version of the router loses the tri-band Wifi but instead has 8 gigabit LAN ports. This means I could lose the extra network switch I had connected and it streamlines things a bit. This router also has a faster CPU with double the RAM.
Functionality-wise only things to really note are a smart load-balancing between the 2.4Ghz and 5GHz WiFi, and I see an Amazon Alexa / IFTTT remote control functionality added.
I used an interesting utility that fully backs up an Asus router's NVRAM settings and migrates it to a different version Asus router. So had no manual setup to and all the settings were restored including all the traffic stats data. The utility can be found at https://www.snbforums.com/threads/user-nvram-save-restore-utility-r26-2.19521/.
