Netgear delivers unto gamers an enhanced, easy-to-use router
The Netgear Nighthawk Pro Gaming Router has graphical displays, geofiltering to limit distance to servers and players, and all the customization you need.
The XR500 has geofiltering that lets you set a radius around your location to ensure local connections to servers and players.
The Netgear Nighthawk Pro gaming router (XR500), announced on Monday here at CES , is very much built with gamers in mind.
With software powered by Duma OS, geofiltering helps guarantee a local connection, customizable menu dashboards and informative graphical displays tell you everything you need to know about your network, and traffic prioritization gives you more control.
As with most gaming routers, you're going to pay extra for the software and the XR500 is no different, coming in at $300 (about £220 or AU$380 converted).
Locating local internet providers
Spaceship look with all the newest features
Consistent with other routers in the Nighthawk line, the XR500 has a very extraterrestrial look with lots of extra sharp angles throughout its all-black design. It weighs less than 2 pounds but is a little larger than most routers at 12.7 by 9.6 by 2.2 inches. Four external antennas with quad-stream capabilities help to give it its AC2600 rating. It's dual-band with a max speed of 800Mbps on 2.4GHz and 1,733Mbps on 5GHz.
The XR500 has MU-MIMO for fast simultaneous connections, beamforming to create more reliable speeds, a 1.7GHz dual-core processor and two USB 3.0 ports for printers and network storage. It's a little disappointing that it only has four gigabit Ethernet ports for wired connections -- the Asus GT-AC5300 gaming router has eight. Becoming more popular with new routers, the XR500 also offers additional DFS channels and 160MHz channels on the 5GHz band to further enhance your gameplay.
Locating local internet providers
Game on
The gaming features here are seemingly endless.
Geofiltering lets you limit your distance to servers and other players to help ensure a faster local connection. Just set the radius in miles to keep everything local. Pretty cool. You can even whitelist servers you want and blacklist ones you want to avoid.
The customizable dashboard shows real-time ping latency and utilization. Helpful graphs let you monitor internet usage by device to see if one is hogging your bandwidth and causing in-game lag. If you locate a culprit, you can use another graphical display to prioritize all your devices by setting max upload and download speeds.
You can tell Netgear really put a lot of thought into the software and made it visually easy to navigate.
Outlook
I can't say how well the Netgear Nighthawk Pro Gaming Router XR500 works without testing, but for gamers it sounds almost ideal. The dashboards and user interface look extremely intuitive and can help you stabilize ping and reduce latency. If you have $300 to spend, this router has everything you need to improve your gaming experience.
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