Netgear XR700 Gaming Router Review & Comments

Greg Hook

We take a look at Netgear's very top end £449 XR700 Gaming Router, featuring their fully customisable DumaOS gaming dashboard and more features than you can shake a stick at.
Read the review.

Write your own review for Netgear XR700

Jonny Ware

Very interesting article, Netgear aren't responsible for the DumaOS, that is made by a different company NetDuma (based in Cambridge apparently).

The smarthub is a very good hub for free, to get better internet speeds have to go to different 3rd party routers (using better modem chipsets).

I wonder how the Smarthub X compares!

Mister_Tad

I'm struggling to see what the real value is in a single 10GbE port beyond being able to plaster it all over their marketing collateral. I'm even more surprised they went with SFP  as opposed to 10Gbase-T or even 802.3bz

Not at all - at £449 we're at the very top end of consumer routers.

At this price point, not acknowledging that this puts potential buyers amongst SMB gear is a fairly big omission IMO.

Evinger

Sounds a waste of Money.
Sticking with my ASUS RT-AC87U. Not everyone likes Asus, but I've found them fast and Rock Solid. We have a Glass 400 Down 20 Up connection here and with 15 devices including streaming for our ATV 4K & Apple Music separately via iPad in the Kitchen, never a stutter. I restarted it 6 months ago last time.

And, no, I don't work for Asus

vmistery

Agree on strange choice using SFP  on a 'gaming' router, only having one seems fine as it is unlikely any 'gaming' category consumer even really needs 10Gigabit speeds and if they do it will probably be for a single NAS, worst case bung a switch in. This router though is most certainly not something I would put in an SMB environment, I don't really even like using their managed switches unless the budget is tight!

Mister_Tad

IMO the key benefit of 10Gb in a home environment is the point-to-point speed. Even if you plumb a NAS into your 10Gb, you're still unlikely to getting more than a gigabit-plus-change out of it. An extra 1Gb port with LACP support would be of equal or greater value to the user - but not to the marketer.

Oh for sure not. Not within a mile of SMB.

What I mean is, instead of spanking nigh-on-£500 for this to use at home, the potential buyer would be wise to consider SMB alternatives.

psychopomp1

Or even better buy the Netgear R9000 for £340 - which is exactly the same as the XR700 hardware wise but without the “gaming features “, load third party firmware such as DD-WRT Or Voxel firmware on the R9000, and you have a powerful router with very slick and advanced firmware which lets you do a zillion and one things

vmistery

Point to point with what? If it is another NAS or whatever then this probably wouldn't be the target audience for this router or you'd have a switch seperately to connect your other devices.

Mister_Tad

Point to point between a client and a NAS, pretty much the only place 10Gbit speeds are actually useful in the standard home, or at least the sort of home that's likely to consider a £450 router - which is why the inclusion of just one 10Gb port on this has severely limited value. It's not like you're going to have multiple clients really hammering it to even start to touch the sides of that one 10Gb pipe.

vmistery

I would imagine the idea is that multiple connected devices could use up some of that bandwidth, I can't see why a gamer would need to have that kind of bandwidth between them and their NAS.