The Netgear Nighthawk X8 R8500 is the current flagship 802.11ac router in Netgear's lineup. Packing in three Wi-Fi bands, plus the latest MU-MIMO and quad-stream technology, it's the fastest AC router the company has ever made.

Very fast Wi-Fi; More Ethernet ports than most; Smart Connect for 5GHz bands

Smart Connect doesn't cover all three bands; USB ports hidden under flap; Very large

Big and bruising, Netgear's Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Tri-Band Wi-Fi Router is a networking behemoth that has it all, with a price tag to match. The router has everything from built-in amplified antennas and the latest MU-MIMO technology for more efficient traffic management to six high-speed wired LAN...

Many LAN ports; with support for data aggregation; Active amplified antennas; Triband operations produce impressive speeds; Lots of customization options

Expensive; Bigger than most routers; Sometimes sluggish interface

The router game is heating up once again, after being dormant for what seemed like an eternity, thanks to new iterations of the Broadcom platform. We first examined this platform for 802.11 AC routers back in October when from Netgear, D-Link, TrendNet, and Asus.

Netgear is one of the very few companies that continue to churn out high-quality products time after time. Since I have been reviewing routers, we have gone from seeing the launch of consumer 802.11ac with the first Nighthawk R7000, to several Nighthawk routers later the biggest and possibly best of...

Works great it cover the entire house and most of my yard !

Coverage

None yet

I have Suddenlink internet and I wanted to upgrade my internet to 1000 mbs plan. I went out and purchased this router and I haven't had any issues with it what so ever. It is easily able to put out those speeds.

Design; Easy to Use; Features; Performance; Quiet; value

First power outage, the unit fried. Replaced it with an Apple WiFi router, which has survived a power outage since installation and done fine. While it is difficult to gauge spikes in power when an outage occurs, this is the first unit that died at the first strike, and the last time I purchase a...

Big difference traffic wise in my house compared to the isp provided wifi/router. no more collisions or dropouts so far. still exploring some of the features for future use.

Nighthawk X8 R8500-100PES Tri-Band Quad-Stream Wi-Fi Router Is really boon for me as it is easy to set up.It giving me very good quality & good wifi speed.Even my brother brought seeing it's qualities.

Incredibly easy to set up. It significantly improved the coverage at my place. True, it's more expensive... but I bought it to support a NAS. Definitely worth the extra cost if you're in the market for digitizing your media.