Hatch Sleep ClockEarly Black Friday DealsBest Alexa SpeakersBest Tech GiftsDeals DeliveredGift Guides The Big InterviewMagazineEventsWIRED InsiderWIRED Consulting The first Wi-Fi 8 router has arrived. This quad-band gaming beast from Asus is fabulously fast and feature-packed. Loads of multi-gig ports.
No subscription required. Wi-Fi 8 hasn't fully arrived, and we're even further out from Wi-Fi 8-compatible devices to come out in the real world. But I've already gotten a taste of the future of wireless connectivity.
I tried out Asus's first quad-band Wi-Fi 8 gaming router, ahead of the final certification of the latest Wi-Fi standard. The router is based on the latest draft spec of Wi-Fi 8, so it will be updated as the standard approaches final certification. The only way I could test the benefits of Wi-Fi 8 was to connect together two of these bad boys. After a couple of weeks of testing, there’s no denying the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is an impressive bit of kit with many extras you don’t get from other manufacturers, including a year of NordVPN service.
The firmware has also been surprisingly reliable for me, unlike first-generation Wi-Fi 7 Asus systems, which took several updates to reach stability. But most folks shouldn’t be thinking about Wi-Fi 8 yet, and this router costs $900, a hefty early adopter tax. The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is enormous, with eight adjustable but permanently affixed antennas. It’s around 14 inches square and 9 inches tall with the antennas and looks like a giant dead mecha spider.
It doesn’t fit comfortably in any of the usual spots I have my router, and it makes absolutely no attempt to blend in. It does look cool, though, with a translucent window that shows off some internal components and a big Aura RGB ROG logo offering seven color lighting effects. There are advantages to all this real estate.
The advanced thermal design, with multiple heatsinks and channels for airflow, allows the router to operate at top performance reliably over the long term without a noisy fan. It remained silent and cool to the touch throughout my month of testing. There’s also space for a generous array of ports, including a 10Gbps WAN/LAN, a 10 Gbps LAN, four 2.5Gbps (one WAN/LAN), one 1Gbps LAN, a USB 3.2 Gen1, and a USB 2.0 port.
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