ASUS RT-AX86S AX5700 Dual Band WiFi 6 Gaming Router $165 + Free Shipping

Just a general question/thought. Aren't the days of Asus asking us pay $150-$500 for routers is over? Plenty of wifi 6 routers that are under $100 make sense for most households (gaming or not, big houses vs tiny houses, number of clients, Openwrt, etc.). Asus seems overpriced. It's upsetting that they sell 400-600 routers, which makes me want to double down on non-ASUS competitors. I want top-of-the-line routers but the pricing is out of control. Is this the best price/performance router or is there another? How about this one for example.

Just a general question/thought. Aren't the days of Asus asking us pay $150-$500 for routers is over? Plenty of wifi 6 routers that are under $100 make sense for most households (gaming or not, big houses vs tiny houses, number of clients, Openwrt, etc.). Asus seems overpriced. It's upsetting that they sell 400-600 routers, which makes me want to double down on non-ASUS competitors. I want top-of-the-line routers but the pricing is out of control. Is this the best price/performance router or is there another? How about this one for example.

I agree with your sentiment but absolutely do not mess around with anything but Asus or Netgear in the home/consumer grade router market. TP-Link, Belkin/Linksys... other brands have absolutely horrendous firmware/software, the online "reviews" are mostly bought and paid for. Just as one personal example, I was using a TP-Link AX50 for a long time and could never get the full 1Gbps speed hardwired from my building (I literally never got more than 300Mbps over wire), I subconsciously assumed it was some long standing issue with the ISP, after I finally called and had them come by and check my wiring, I was getting full speed straight out of the wall the whole time--it turned out that the POS TP-Link had software issues that literally cut the speed down 1/3 and were never fixed (finally dug around enough online and found out about it in a random tech support forum). Also recently had a Linksys 9600/9610 that was awful at dropping connections (literally had to cancel a work meeting I was running early due to drops) and its firmware was full of weird bugs and errors, and it was extremely limited in what you could do to begin with.

At least with Asus, if you get a Merlin compatible model you have another source of firmware that has a 3rd party fixing bugs in it and whatnot, and those have been generally very solid for me and actually perform better than the factory releases. Some Netgear is OK in my experience, others are apparently really bad (their mesh stuff?) but anything else in consumer router world I wouldn't touch. Sad how bad the whole thing is really.

So confused by this comment lol ^^^^

I need a new router for my fiber. Will this work that well? I was always told to with surfboards

It is true routers are overpriced but if I have to buy an overpriced router it will be an Asus. I would pass on this version and get the AX86U because it is a quad core processor. The AX86s is dual core and the same processor that's in the ac86u. The only real reason to buy a router of this caliber is if you're going to run a VPN on your router and use Merlin firmware. If you're not looking to have a VPN on your router then by all means buy something cheaper.

I have the Zaku version of the AX86U and it's been great so far.

I agree with your sentiment but absolutely do not mess around with anything but Asus or Netgear in the home/consumer grade router market. TP-Link, Belkin/Linksys... other brands have absolutely horrendous firmware/software, the online "reviews" are mostly bought and paid for. Just as one personal example, I was using a TP-Link AX50 for a long time and could never get the full 1Gbps speed hardwired from my building (I never got more than 300Mbps over wire), I subconsciously assumed it was some long standing issue with the ISP, after I finally called and had them come by and check my wiring, I was getting full speed straight out of the wall the whole time--it turned out that the POS TP-Link had software issues that cut the speed down 1/3 and were never fixed (finally dug around enough online and found out about it in a random tech support forum). Also recently had a Linksys 9600/9610 that was awful at dropping connections (had to cancel a work meeting I was running early due to drops) and its firmware was full of weird bugs and errors, and it was extremely limited in what you could do to begin with.

At least with Asus, if you get a Merlin compatible model you have another source of firmware that has a 3rd party fixing bugs in it and whatnot, and those have been generally very solid for me and actually perform better than the factory releases. Some Netgear is OK in my experience, others are apparently really bad (their mesh stuff?) but anything else in consumer router world I wouldn't touch. Sad how bad the whole thing is really.